Rise of Roses - 2B or not RWBBY?
by AshAntares444
Summary: Faunus!Weiss. What if Ruby Rose had an adopted brother without silver eyes or anything else to make him special? What if he was a terrible and slow fighter, his only talent was crafting big weapons, and he barely made it into Beacon? How hard would he try to catch up to his sister, keep everyone safe, and become an amazing Huntsman? AU, rated T for Teen.
1. The Fire Rises

He still remembered the day he met her, the day his luck finally changed.

As a reward for her amazingly high Signal Academy entrance exams, Tai had brought Ruby to a pet store to pick out any pet she wanted. Yang and Qrow had tagged along, and while Tai was trying very hard to drag his kids away from the violent and dangerous animals on offer, Qrow was having fun encouraging his girls to look at the deadliest semblance-mutated creatures he could find. Unfortunately, everything looked cute as a baby, even a monster that would be bigger than a house when fully grown.

"Look, Ruby, this one's looking at you!" Tai pulled Ruby away from a Wolf pup already twice her size and tried to get her to look at a much smaller dog, like a Corgi.

"Look, Ruby, this one's looking at you too!" Qrow caught Ruby's attention and pointed out a massive and poisonous snake in a car-sized glass container. Its label claimed that the snake's species was "The Incredibly Deadly Viper".

"Woah, cool!" Ruby rushed over to the viper and pressed her face up against the glass, terrifying it.

Tai silently pleaded for Qrow to stop with his face, but Qrow just shrugged. It was only a matter of time before his bad luck Semblance made something unlucky happen and broke all the glass, freeing all the animals. So he might as well have his fun before that happened.

"Come on, Ruby, look at how sad this puppy looks!" Tai asked, pointing at the dopey and cheerful Corgi soon to be known as Zwei. "Don't you want him?"

"I do I do I do!" Ruby insisted. "I want all of them!"

"We only have room for one pet," Tai reminded her. "A small one."

Ruby broke away from Tai and kept looking around, bouncing off the walls as an excitable bundle of rose petals.

And then, something caught Ruby's eye. She turned around, and pointed through the building's glass window. Her family followed her finger and saw that across the street from this pet store, there was a coldly sterile, clean and eerie orphanage with a miserable boy slightly younger than her staring at her through the building's glass window with big, teary eyes. His hair was red and his eyes were redder, and not just from crying. Her family felt bad, but when they looked down at her heartfelt, touched, and eager face, they felt even worse. "Dad, that one's looking at me!" Ruby insisted. "We have to save him from the orphanage!"

"I don't know..."

"He's small just like me! I'll take good care of him and feed him and-" Ruby began.

Yang laughed. "Ruby, you know that's a person, right?"

"I know that!" Ruby pouted adorably. "But an Orphanage is just like a Pet Shop just for people and I want him!"

Qrow laughed. "That's one way to look at it."

Tai thought about this. His house had felt empty to him for a long time, but he doubted adding just one person could change that. And it's not like there was a stigma around adopting children in a world full of Grimm. He probably lost his family to the Grimm... Then again, there was a chance he was kicked out of his family for misbehaving. He didn't want someone like that in his house. So he'd have to go over there and talk to the manager to find out more about this child. "If we're getting him, then I get to choose the pet," He decided. He genuinely fell in love with that little Corgi.

"Fine! But please pick a puppy they're so cuuute!" Ruby squeed.

"Alright, I'll think about this... But I'm not making any decisions until I find out more about him," Tai decided, striding out of the store and crossing the street, entering the orphanage.

Qrow leaned down to his kids. "Are you sure you'll both be okay with this? If we're serious about keeping him, then he'll have to learn to be a Huntsman like me."

"That'd be so cool!" Ruby squeed, eyes sparkling like infinite diamonds. "I'm finally gonna get a baby brother!"

Yang shrugged. "I'm cool with it. He has red eyes, and my eyes get red when I'm angry. We could say he's our brother and nobody would know any better."

"Hey, bartender!" Qrow called to the pet seller, who was confused. "Sorry, force of habit. We're taking one Corgi to go."

"Thank you!" Said the pet-seller, who was an incredibly hot 20ish white-eared rabbit Faunus girl dressed in white and red. The mere sight of her was enough to make Qrow wish he was ten years younger and in this babe's age range.

"Where do you find these animals?" Qrow asked her.

"I get them from the animal shelter down the road." She explained. "My Semblance lets me rewrite animals to be stronger, faster, bigger, smaller, whatever I want. So I turn animals nobody wants to adopt into warbeasts any Huntsman or Huntress would love to have at his side! Even the smallest pets here will be huge when fully grown!"

Qrow grinned and decided not to tell Tai about this.

Tai emerged from the orphanage, with the kid in tow. As they entered the pet store, the family got a good look at the boy. Short straight red hair that ended at his shoulders and covered one of his cherry red eyes, pale skin, and an expression like a beaten dog offered kindness for the first time in his life. He was dressed in a normal red shirt and normal black pants and scarred and scuffed black shoes that looked like they'd seen a lifetime of use.

And when he was told who wanted to save him from his lonely orphanage life, he rushed over and hugged her. He hugged Ruby Rose tight, and if she was anyone else, she wouldn't have hugged back so quickly. And side by side, red next to red, they certainly did look similar.

"He lost his family to a Grimm attack when he was too young to remember anything," Tai whispered to Qrow, "He lived out in the countryside in the middle of nowhere. By the time the Huntsmen showed up to save him, he was the only survivor, trapped in some box. And the woman who runs the joint wanted to give him away to the first happy family they saw."

"Is he a troublemaker?" Qrow asked hopefully.

"No, they just really wanted him to be happy." Tai explained.

"They feel bad for me," The boy explained sadly. "But that's okay. My name's Blaze."

They noticed that he was still hugging her, tightly yet not squeezing, as if terrified of squishing her and terrified of being dragged away from her.

"What's your last name?" Ruby asked.

"I don't have one. The Grimm killed my parents and burned my farm to the ground before they could tell me my real name."

"Is that why you're called Blaze?" Yang asked. Her father and Qrow cringed.

"Yeah. The Orphanage lady thinks it sounds cool." He didn't seem bothered at all by what she said, as if he thought about what he lost all the time until it stopped hurting as much as it used to.

"Grimm aren't known for leaving survivors." Qrow said. "How did you survive?"

"I only survived because my parents put me in a really tough box. Some old thing from Beacon, that's what the Huntsmen who found me called it. They came to kill Grimm when they saw the smoke and they brought me here. I have a necklace from my parents, and that's all I've got. But it doesn't have any words on the inside, or any pictures."

He reached into his shirt and pulled out a steel cord with a gold heart-shaped locket on the end. It opened when you tapped the bottom, and its interior was blank and perfectly smooth. The two girls leaned closer to get a better look at it, and then Yang noticed something on his face. "What's up with your eye?"

"Which one?" Blaze asked nervously, backing away.

"The one your hair's covering up. Come on, EYE want to see it!"

"Oh, that one. It's... different." He turned away and hid it. "Please don't make fun of it."

"I won't, I just want to see! Come on, EYE promise I won't say anything."

He closed his eyes, pushed his hair away from his covered eye, and opened them to reveal that while his left eye was cherry red, his right eye wasn't cherry red, it was yellow.

"Well that's a let down. Mine are way more different," Yang noted, her eyes flashing to red for a few seconds as her hair ignited.

He leapt away from her in shock his back hitting a shelf full of fish. He calmed down, embarrassed. "Uh... Yeah, they are. But I think they're nice! Nicer than my stupid eyes that don't even match."

"Thanks, kid!" She ruffled his hair like a dog, and he melted into her touch like a puppy that needed more patpats.

"Don't call your eyes stupid, I think they're neat!" Ruby insisted. "One red one and one yellow one. That's cool! It's like you have two different-coloured guns, but they're eyes! What's your Semblance?"

"I don't know." He said sadly. And then he noticed the weapon at Ruby's hip, and became less mopey. "Woah, what's that?"

"You like her?" Ruby gasped hopefully. She unfolded her weapon in the middle of the pet shop and spun her weapon around, accidentally decapitating a statue of a giant lizard before stabbing its scythe point into the ground. The head of the lizard fell on Qrow's foot, hurting him a little, and he decided to leave the room before anything worse struck.

"She's beautiful!" He squeed, stroking the side of the blade. "I love her already!"

"She's also a gun!" She boasted.

"Show me show me show me!" He squeed. "I don't have a Semblance but I've still got aura, shoot me in the face!"

"No, not in here!" The pet store's owner insisted. "Not after the last time someone fired a weapon in here!"

"Aww," The two kids awwed in unison.

"I love weapons," Blaze admitted to his new sister. "I swear I'm not weird, I don't love fighting way too much like a crazy person or something, I just think swords and guns are really really cool! I grew up hearing stories about the best hunters ever, and the super cool weapons they used! I always wanted to draw them but I didn't have any pens or paper."

"That's okay, you can use mine! I built my Crescent Rose today at Signal."

"I want to make something just like it, so we match!"

"Thanks, but you should make the weapons you've dreamed of making instead. A weapon is an extension of its user's soul, after all! Hey, you can paint yours red so we can match in colour!" She offered.

"Yeah!" He smiled.

"You need a last name. Want to be Blaze Rose?" She offered.

"Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!" He looked like an overeager puppy about to soil the floor. Finally, he could have a family!

"Come on, Rubes, why can't he be a Xiao Long?" Yang asked.

"A what?" He asked, confused. "I'm not a show for anyone."

"That's my name. Yang Xiao Long," Yang stated.

"Yang... Yang Shwow Long." He attempted.

"Yang Xiao Long!" She insisted.

"Sand meow wrong." He attempted again.

"Okay, now you're just messing with me!"

He laughed a little. "Yeah," He smiled.

"You're annoying my big sister!" Ruby grinned, hugging him. "You're a real Rose already! By the power invested in me by me, I hereby christen you... Blaze Rose!" Ruby declared.

"Woohoo!" He threw his fists up into the air.

And that was how their destinies became intertwined.

Their family life was happy and sappy and best skipped before two hundred chapters of a perfect cute home life gives you super diabetes. It's like regular diabetes except the sugar granules in your bloodstream wear little capes made of more sugar before they clog your arteries and stop your heart. Over time Blaze came out of his shell of misery, becoming more of a fun and friendly little ball of energy. Whenever someone bullied Ruby and Yang wasn't around to kick their butts, he kicked their butts so bad that next time they tried to bully Ruby when Blaze was around, they ran screaming for Yang to protect them. Which was stupid because then they got beaten up by all three. The important part is that he was enrolled into her class at Signal, since they shared the same age and he had no idea when his birthday was, so she decided to share her birthday with him and give him half of her giant cake-sized cookie.

At Signal, he tried his hardest at everything to make up for his complete lack of natural talent in anything other than weapon-building. He tried way too hard and often injured himself, but he never allowed this to discourage him. Though he lagged far behind her in the speed and skill department, he never discovered what his Semblance was, and he was a mediocre fighter at best. To pay for his keep, Blaze got a job at a small and independent Dust store struggling to make ends meet in a world dominated by the Schnee Dust Company. This gave him more access to Dust so he could start crafting stronger weapons that required more Dust to operate. Many teachers were still impressed by his weapon-building skills, however, and encouraged him to leave behind his dreams of becoming a Huntsman and focus on becoming a professional weaponsmith. Still he turned them all down, even the one weapon-crafting teacher with connections in that industry. He wanted to fight by her side, after all. He wanted to fight at Ruby's side and save her life a thousand times to make up for how she saved his life from loneliness. He eventually built stupidly strong weapons he could barely use, and then he practiced with those. And in time, they both became skilled warriors and got sent to Beacon Academy.

Beacon Academy, where the buildings were big, the colours were bright, and some blonde kid vomited into a trash can. Yang immediately met her friends and left with them, leaving the young silver-eyed huntress and her cherryellow-eyed adoptive brother alone.

Ruby Rose looked the same as usual, and you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't know who Ruby was and what she looked like back then, except her hair was longer and spikier, having already gained its redder tips. And like her hair, Blaze had grown quite a bit over the years. He wasn't as tall as Yang just yet, but he was exactly four inches taller than Ruby. And while he wasn't exactly fast before, his current armaments weighed him down a little. He wore thick and shiny red plate armour lined with gold over an all-black tracksuit, but his hands were coated in fingerless red leather. His forearms bore gauntlets like Yang's though longer and thicker with extra-thick flame-shaped armour plates on the back, and they didn't work the same, or match each other when they were active. However, his left one was gold with red highlights and his right one was red with gold highlights, to contrast with his cherry red left eye and his golden right eye. He was no longer ashamed of his weird eyes. Yet despite these bulky forearm armaments, his main weapon was on his back, a mysterious red and gold rectangle that could be anything, yet it was notably a foot longer and thicker than the folded-up Crescent Rose on Ruby's clothing.

The two red siblings huddled closer to each other for warmth and strength in this scary new environment. Everyone else was scary and unknown, they looked like black silhouettes that could attack like Grimm at any second.

And then they started noticing everyone's weapons, geeking out over how cool everything looked! Except Blaze, in typical Blaze fashion, kept insisting that the weapons he saw totally weren't all that cool and his weapon was totally better than all of them and he could kick the butt of everyone here. Totally. What a dork.

Still, they hadn't moved. And they had to move some time. The non-blood-related twins looked to each other, and nodded. And then they walked down the steps, hand in hand, as they were both shy souls. When faced with scary new things, they moved closer to each other for comfort and reassurance. But at each other's side, looking at each other, they felt like they could do anything.

Except notice whoever just crashed into them, sending the trio into a heap of three dolts and some briefcases.

"What are you doing?!" A girl in white demanded.

"Sorry," Ruby apologized reflexively. Blaze didn't, he hated admitting when he was wrong. And he didn't think he was wrong since she crashed into them from behind.

"'Sorry'? Do you have any idea of the damage you could have caused? Give me that-" The girl in white grabbed a briefcase of dust. "This is Dust, mined and purified from the Schnee quarry!"

"Made with real Faunus slave blood, sweat and tears!" Blaze joked.

"Don't be ridiculous." She growled and started shaking a glass container of Dust in Ruby's face extra-hard, improperly secured and leaking because the girl hadn't grown out of being stupid yet. One day, she would be the best girl in team RWBY. But for now, she sucked. "And you! What are you, braindead? Dust! Fire, water, lightning, energy! Are you even listening to me?"

"That's right, dear," Blaze whispered, "Shake the dangerous and explosive substance in my sister's face harder. See where it gets shoved if you don't shove off."

"How dare you!" She started shaking the dust harder. "I will shake whatever I want wherever I want, whenever I want! What do you have to say about that, huh?"

"That's what your mom said last night." He said, enraging her.

Ruby inhaled the dust and sneezed, engulfing the Schnee Heiress in a sparking and frosty cloud of flames. It was a good thing she had aura, or she'd be as overcooked as the food Blaze couldn't cook right to save his life.

The dust container flew through the air and landed near the foot of some cool Faunus girl.

"Unbelievable! This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about!" The ashen Weiss berated further berated the shy and helpless Ruby.

"Wait a second. You're Weiss Schnee, right?" Blaze asked.

"Obviously, you dolt!"

"Then Ruby, you... you just... Schneezed!"

The two redheads stared at each other for a moment. And then they burst into laughter, infuriating the enraged Schnee further.

"What the... How dare..." She tried, but they weren't listening. All the awkwardness and shame was gone, this had gone from a tense situation to a hilarious one.

"I'm Blaze Rose, this is Ruby Rose. We'll laugh about this in a week, want to be friends?" Blaze offered his friendship.

"Never!" She snatched her dust bottle from the approaching Faunus girl and stormed off.

"I promise I'll make it up to you!" Ruby called after Weiss.

Blaze nudged her a little. "You don't owe her anything, that dolt should watch where she's going when she's transporting so much dust at once. Doesn't she have a butler to carry her stuff, or something? It's like she's never pushed one of those carts in her life."

"That's probably true. I have to say, that's one way to resolve a conflict with someone like her," The Faunus girl noted.

"I've dealt with enough petty bullies in my life to know when you should threaten them, and when you should laugh at them." Blaze said sagely, watching the girl storm off. He looked cool, Ruby thought, because she had no idea that he was actually staring at her legs.

"If only all bullies were that easy to deal with," Said Blake.

"Hey, if anyone ever gives you any trouble, give us a call." Blaze smiled, patting his sister Ruby on the shoulder. "My sister's faster than the wind!" He bragged.

"And my brother really really loves beating people up!" She bragged.

"I just love winning, I swear I'm not weird! I don't LOVE fighting like a crazy person, that's ridiculous!" He grinned.

"I'm Ruby and this is Blaze. What's your na-" Ruby began, turning to face her, only to see that the Faunus was walking away.

He watched her leave and as she walked out of earshot, he said something to his sister. "Man, those two girls... I just can't decide..."

"You can't decide what?"

"I can't decide whose legs are nicer!" He grinned.

"Blaze!" She laughed, shoving him.

He laughed and shoved her back.

The two heard a girl's laughter. They turned to see a red-haired and green-eyed girl with an autumn-coloured set of armour. "I wish I had a sibling," Pyrrha admitted.

"Finally!" He shouted, surprising her. "Someone who can tell we're siblings, instead of assuming we're something else."

"Does that happen often?" Pyrrha asked.

"Like you wouldn't believe." Blaze laughed. "Hey, I'm Blaze Rose and this is Ruby Rose. I'm two for two today, want to walk away from us dramatically?"

"I could do that, but I think I'd rather try and become your friend."


	2. Pyrrha

"And that's my entire life's story, the entire history of my country, and how those things are interconnected directly and thematically." Pyrrha finished explaining, the trio walking and talking through Beacon grounds.

"Wow, I'm... sorry." Ruby said, unsure what to say. Blaze hugged her, he was a hugger and she could use a hug.

"Please, don't be... I'm fine. All of that tragedy and heartache made me stronger, even if my fame has made me unapproachable to many. Maybe that's why I'm telling you all of this, since you're the first people to talk to me instead of trying to win me over. By the way, I must say... It's so nice to talk to people without them putting me on a pedestal," Pyrrha smiled.

"Why would I put you on a pedestal?" Blaze wondered. "I could kick your butt if I wanted to."

Pyrrha laughed. "That's the first time anyone's said anything like that to me."

"It's true, though. My sword's way bigger than your dinky little javelin."

She smiled. "There's much more to fighting than the size of one's weapon."

"Really? I didn't know that. Why don't you teach me your ways?"

She tilted her head at him. "Are you sure? I've had rather strict teachers in my lifetime, and I'm going to imitate them."

"Be as strict as you want, Uncle Qrow says those are the best kinds of women where it counts."

Pyrrha stopped, and the other two stopped. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"I have no idea!" Blaze smiled. "But it sounds cool, doesn't it? I want to be cool like him. That's why I try to rip him off sometimes. I'm not very good at it, though. Honestly, since we're sharing super intimate secrets about ourselves with complete strangers today, I don't know where I stop and the acting begins. I feel bad about being an Orphan for so long, but I try to act happy whenever I feel about moping about it like a loser. I feel bad about not being as strong as my sister but I try to act like I'm fine with that, too. If anyone had to be stronger than me, I'm glad it's her. But I still wish I was the best ever, you know? I wish I was just born the fastest and strongest so I'd never have to try hard. Trying is exhausting. Also, you know what else sucks? Never getting to make choices. Some people have lived lives where they get to decide things and figure out who they are as people, but for the longest time, I've just been whatever the situation needs of me. Or that was me, until I met Ruby and the rest of her family. They gave me a happier life than I ever thought I'd have! I don't know exactly who I am. But I know a few things about me. I know I like weapons and fights and cool stuff like that. I know I want all the ladies to love me. I hate Grimm. And I know I want a ton of friends. I want to protect my siblings. I'm not ashamed of my red and yellow eyes any more, that's why I don't hide my eyes with my hair any more. If I had to die anywhere, I'd want to die from a heart attack at a really old age with a million wives and a billion kids, or die young and cool on the battlefield after becoming incredibly famous so I don't have to deal with getting old and getting old people knees. I like annoying people. Probably more than I should. I hate the White Fang, and I hate the Grimm even more. Grimm killed my birth parents, but I don't know anything about them. And that's about it. That's all I know about who I am. That might seem kind of shallow and generic as far as personalities go, but what am I supposed to do, pretend to have a bunch of random weird quirks like hating a number or fearing something harmless? I pretend to enjoy my big sister's terrible puns, that's enough pretending for one lifetime."

He secretly loved his big sister's puns, but he wasn't about to admit that.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Beacon, Jaune was forming a lifelong friendship with a quiet boy wise beyond his years. The cute quirky girl who followed him around every second of every day was cute, too.


	3. The Emerald Forest

And then a bunch of unimportant stuff happened but eventually they got launched into a forest. The usual landing strategies were employed, and Ruby used her Semblance to tackle Blaze and land in a tree. With the two of them together, they held hands and leapt down onto the forest floor.

Elsewhere, Weiss was fighting a bunch of Grimm, remembering her training and rocketing towards one Grimm in a lethal Stinger attack. But before she could strike true and begin a Million Stabs before High Timing it up and switching to Swordmaster to do an air combo before Helm Splitting it back to the ground, someone who stole most of his moves from a different source got involved.

A swarm of rose petals struck the Grimm and became a girl dressed in red and black, slashing the beast apart in one hit before throwing her armoured brother at another Grimm hard enough to crush it.

Weiss stumbled to a stop and swung her blade in a random direction, sending out a wave of fire, but Blaze grabbed a nearby Ursa and threw it at the fire before it could start a forest fire.

"Hey," Blaze casually greeted her.

"Oh, great! Crater Face and her lover-boy." Weiss groaned.

"I'm her brother, you jerk!" Blaze snapped.

"That makes it even worse!" Weiss shouted back.

"We aren't together, you dolt!" Blaze shouted back.

"Then why do you hold hands so often?"

"Why is nobody holding your hand?!"

"Because unlike you, I don't need anyone to hold my hand!" She shouted, and pointed at Ruby. "You should be more careful around dust! You could have blasted me off a cliff!"

"How about I make it up to you by throwing you off the nearest cliff myself?" Blaze shouted.

"Guys, quit fighting!" Ruby yelled. "We all saw each other, so we're teammates now! We need to work together to complete this task!"

"Forget this task! I'd rather fail than work with two dunces who don't even know how to be safe around dust."

"Would you give that lie a rest? You crashed into us, and your suitcases full of dust fell to the ground. Big SDC suitcases for tiny dust vials, I'm sure those suitcases can take a few knocks, right? Everything would have been fine if you didn't take that dust out and shake it in my sister's face! She's already apologized for the mess you made, now stop disgracing yourself already! God, I'd say you're a disgrace to your family name if it was ever worth anything. Go berate some Faunus slave who's forced to listen to your nonsense, I'm out of here. Come on, Ruby. Let's leave this ice queen alone with her friends."

He turned and started walking away, fully intent on leaving Weiss to deal with the Grimm around her.

An enraged Weiss silently readied her sword, and prepared to strike from the back in a fit of rage, before stopping. "Hey, you!" She decided to call out. "Blaze Rose, isn't it? Once I've defeated these Grimm, you're next!"

He stopped, laughed, and returned to the fight. "Don't make me laugh, that flimsy little toothpick of yours couldn't even pierce my armour!" Blaze laughed, drawing his rectangular red and gold weapon from his back. He clenched his left fist, activating the Yang-inspired gold-lined crimson gauntlet on that hand. Its thick metal segments started to spread themselves out and massive 50MG Dust Bullets far larger than a shotgun shell were revealed. This wasn't a weapon for turning a rapid flurry of blows into a devastating stream of gunfire, this was a weapon for turning single one-armed punches into decisive battle-ending strikes, no matter how the arm-shattering forces of recoil blasted him back or wore on his aura. He wished he had a Semblance like Yang's that could turn that devastating recoil into even more damage on his extra strikes, but he still hadn't unlocked his Semblance. For all he knew, it could be anything.

The red and gold rectangle in his right hand unfolded itself, steam spraying out, motor engines whirring. Segments stretched and locked into place until the device was a mighty tower shield with a sharp triangular base and a long sword hilt sticking out of the top. He shoved his shield onto his left forearm, leaving his fist free for punches, punches made into lethal rocket strikes by that deadly left gauntlet. "This shield's name is Mordread. I mixed Gravity dust with lightning dust to create Magnet Dust! It's infused with enough of that stuff to bounce back any projectile, or keep any melee attacker's weapon helplessly stuck to it. But that isn't a sword..."

He drew the hilt from his shield, revealing that it lacked a blade. And then he revved its gold snakeskin handle like a motorcycle, rotating its multicoloured round dust-filled Pommel to craft a long and flaming yet weightless Zweihander blade out of red Fire dust. That incredibly long blade would be difficult for a grown man to wield without aura, yet the thing was as weightless as it got without a solid blade, balanced in the hilt for manoeuvrability that would rival a fencer's foil. Yet with the weapon's ability to change dust type and weapon shape freely, it could easily take on the explosive force of fire dust, the shocking power of lightning dust, the chilling cold of ice dust, a standard force blade, or the deadly weight of gravity dust. "That's a sword!"

Ruby started fighting the Grimm around them, since these two were determined to stand around and watch Blaze show off his weaponry.

He activated his right gauntlet, expanding to reveal more massive dust cartridges. But this wasn't a weapon in its own right, this was something else. Metallic vices on rotating metal arms emerged from that gauntlet to clamp themselves onto the sides of his sword hilt, screwing themselves shut. They could rotate and bend to and fro, they kept a solid grip on his weapon, and they wouldn't get in the way of his sword swings or restrict his weapon's mobility in any way. And as he fired one cartridge, Weiss saw exactly what that gauntlet was for. The sound of cannonfire rang out to blast their eardrums and shatter those of anyone listening without aura, delivering pain to the Grimm, as all the densely-packed electricity in a single 50MG bullet of dust was unleashed in a single strike, the spent shell ejected and falling to the ground. Lethal amounts of shocking electrical dust zapped its way through the metal arms and into the weapon's hilt, electrifying the crimson blade and wreathing it in deadly gold. Before everyone's eyes, lightning wreathed the Zweihander to engulf and lengthen and widen and sharpen and thicken it, turning the reasonably long and thin sword into an impossibly long and thick seven foot testament to Dust's power. "And this? This is my sword!"

"For your weapons to handle so much dust... Such craftsmanship..." Weiss gasped.

"You've seen my sword, Mordread. You've seen my sword, Excaliber. You've seen my left gauntlet for shooting foes with whatever I want, Double Down. And you've seen my right gauntlet for enhancing my Excaliber's power beyond its limits, Ante Up."

Weiss seemed only a little shaken by the prospect of fighting this man, until she remembered that he was not a man, but a child. And she'd faced foes with far larger swords before. He wielded mighty weaponry, but how well could he use it?

And did he really have a counter for... That trick she could do?

She pointed her sword at him, forming a Gravity Dust-infused Glyph beneath him. And just like that, the mighty warrior was brought to his knees, and then to his chest, stuck to the ground.

"You're weighed down by all that armour, and all those weapons... All the Dust in the world couldn't do you any good if you can't lift a thing!" She gloated.

But his overcharged blade, touching the ground, sent flaming thunder shockwaves in random directions as it started to overheat. Some waves homed in on Grimm and struck true, incinerating them. Some struck trees and started small fires. Weiss dodged one that headed right for her, losing concentration on the Glyph beneath Blaze, which shrunk and faded away.

"You fool!" Blaze grinned, hopping to his feet.

Weiss remembered him and formed the Gravity Glyph beneath him again, disabling him once more even as a forest fire started to rage and numerous Grimm started to arrive. Weiss looked uncertainly at the worsening conditions around her, and considered bailing.

He turned his head up at her and grinned. "Did you forget... how my armour works?"

For a brief moment, the Gravity Runes on his armour activated, and his red and gold armour turned black. And then he fell right at Weiss, becoming a lethal projectile she leapt twenty feet in the air to avoid.

He aimed his gun gauntlet at her, preparing to fire, but she formed a row of Glyphs beneath him that increased his speed.

And so he sped up and missed his chance to shoot as he sailed on past her, falling horizontally without end.

Weiss landed and turned to watch him go, wondering if he was going to stop and turn around any time soon.

Could... Could he even do that? Or was he using this as an excuse to leave this fight? Was he not sure if he could win? Was he the type to never fight someone unless he was sure he could win? Did he intentionally start this fire to leave behind a situation he had an excuse to leave? Was he secretly a tactical genius hiding behind the veneer of a foolish and cheerful peppy little airhead with an admirable protective streak and a hidden well of burning fury?

"Well, he's not stopping any time soon." Ruby said deadpanly. "Guess it's just you and me now."

A burning tree fell near the two girls as the forest fire grew into an inferno even the Grimm started to flee from.

Weiss grabbed Ruby and fled, and once they'd gotten to safety, they called each other idiots or whatever. Weiss blamed Ruby for getting in the way of an attack and "Not showing the proper restraint" even though she was the one whose lack of restraint almost started a forest fire. She then called Blaze a dolt for actually starting a forest fire with the weapon she'd forced him to drop. She'd been impressed before, but now it seemed she'd completely lost all respect for the young man and his weaponsmithing abilities. Ruby sliced a tree in half that very easily could have been the absolute knucklehead known as Weiss. Looking back on the good old days before everything hit the fan, even an adult Weiss herself would struggle to believe there was ever a time when she was this detestable. They argued a lot later, too. But some day, they would become very close.

Meanwhile...


	4. The Scent Of The Sky

Meanwhile, Jaune was being an idiot with Pyrrha and not knowing about Aura, something everyone else in his family should have and know how to use. Meanwhile the far cooler Ren was killing a giant Grimm snake and it was epic. Then his girlfriend showed up and she booped him. They're so cute together. I wish girls like Nora were real.

And then, two female Faunus adopted sisters ran into Ren and Nora. One was a big-winged Eagle Faunus named Angela Albright and she wielded an overly long Zweihander that could turn into a whip sword. She was a beautiful blonde bombshell Nora immediately covered Ren's eyes at the sight of, because while her legs and arms were armoured with white snakeskin leather, her white shirt had a V-neck and her chest could make grown women jealous. The other one was a Skunk faunus named Chloe Eunice with a raised and curled Skunk tail, a white shirt that matched her sister, and a white skirt turned up at the ends. Two folded-up fans with hidden blades and hidden revolvers were at her hips. She wasn't as 'Gifted' as her sister but she had a massive butt instead.

"Oh, won't you kind strangers help lil' old me?" Chloe asked flirtatiously.

"Come within five feet of Ren and I'll break your legs!" Nora shouted.

Chloe wisely backed away.

"What my sister is trying to say is... We could use your help. I can't keep saving her forever." Angela explained tiredly.

Nora looked between the two skeptically. "You two are sisters?"

"She's adopted." Chloe pointed at her winged sister. "And we have company."

They were pursued by four Ursa Grimm. Nora readied her hammer and Ren leapt into the trees, but Angela and Chloe didn't seem bothered. Chloe pointed her butt at the Grimm and the trees shook with the noise of what she did, pink air blasting at all three Grimms hard enough to knock them back into trees. Chloe waved her arms like an airbender and that pink air became a drill that shot into one downed Grimm's chest, obliterating it. Angela, on the other hand, put one hand on her head and focused on a downed Grimm for a second before whipping out her whip-sword at it. Where her whip struck, before their very eyes, the Ursa's colours turned completely white and it began attacking its nearest friend, the two monsters equally matched and stuck fighting one another. That only left one Grimm.

Ren shot at the final Grimm while dodging around it to distract it, and Nora slammed her hammer into the beast's knees, sweeping both legs and obliterating those knees. With a manic grin, she turned her weapon into a grenade launcher, shoved its barrel down the Grimm's mouth, and fired a grenade into the beast's throat. Ren swung from a vine to grab her and drag her to safety, and the grenade exploded, blasting the Grimm's head apart.

The two remaining Ursa fighting on the ground were dispatched by Chloe who turned her fans into revolvers and blasted them while Angela beheaded them both.

With the threat defeated, the four were left to ponder what just happened.

"How did you turn that Grimm to our side?" Ren asked.

"My Semblance is called False Angel, I can compel any creature or person act to against its own interests, morals, and desires." Angela explained. "I can't control what you do under my power, just suggest things to a senseless mockery of you. If you'd normally never kick a puppy or stab your teammate, I can compel you to do just that. And if a criminal wound normally never let a hostage go or turn himself in, I can compel him to do that. I can even turn Grimm against one another. But only one at a time. Any more than that, and I get headaches. For reasons you can guess, I refuse to use it on any but the vilest of foes."

"Why does the air smell... nice?" Nora wondered. The air around them still had a pinkish hue to it.

"Do you like it, sugar? I thought I'd spare you the foulness I can create when my feathers get ruffled." Chloe explained, thrusting a palm at the sky to send her pink air high into the sky, past the clouds. "My tail isn't just for show. Just like a real Skunk, I can make any scent I want."

"I thought Skunks sprayed a liquid, or fine mist from their-" Nora began.

"Fine, smarty-pants. I can do that, but what you saw back there was my Semblance. My Semblance is Skymaster, it lets me create and control any air I want, wherever I want. Red, blue, yellow, clear, grey, pink... And I can make any smell, like used diapers, rotting garbage, dead bodies, sweat, bacon... anything you want. Just don't ask me to replicate my sister's socks! Nothing smells that bad."

"Hey!" Her sister laughed and shoved her. "These armoured shoes are made for kicking, not breathing!"

"Well when you take them off, nobody can breathe without me around to make some fresh air!"

Nora laughed at them. "You're funny. I can see us being the best of friends!"

She scooped them all up in a massive hug, spooking Chloe into gassing the forest clearing with a foul green gas. They were all sent coughing to the ground, except for her, who blushed embarassedly. "Haha... sorry."


	5. Interlude

Elsewhere...

Tai Yang was alone in his house, and Zwei was there, too. His dopey and adorable expression kept the old man's spirits up as he filed his taxes.


	6. Team RWBBY, CARN, and RANE are formed

He was burning through the sky. He was Blaze, and he was still going. And going, and going... Eventually he crashed into a swarm of Ursa Grimm sword-first like a cannonball, and he ended up in the gaze of Blake and Yang at the same time. He brought the leader of the Ursa pack to the ground with his armoured weight, and enraged the rest of the bears.

"Hi, Yang." Blaze casually greeted his sister.

"Hi, Blaze." Yang casually greeted her brother.

Blake thought the world had gone mad, and she leapt towards the trees to start assassinating Grimm.

Yang ducked a massive claw swipe from an Ursa, bobbing and weaving before counterattacking with a rush of ten punches, followed by a huge uppercut that took the Grimm into the sky.

Without any warning besides the sound of cannonfire, a whip-sword launched itself out of Blaze's left arm and shot towards an Ursa Grimm, wrapping around its neck and tightly constricting. With a sound like cannonfire, the weapon retracted once more, sending him on a one-way ride to the foe. He thrust his oversized blade through the Ursa's head, thunder electrifying the foe and flames exploding on impact, blasting the beast apart with a single shot as he kept on flying, rocketing through to plunge his blade into the chest of another Ursa. He let gravity do the rest, falling down, blade slowing his descent as it carved through solid evil, the beast dying and turning to a cloud of smoke.

An Ursa rushed at Blaze and slashed a clawed swipe down at him, but he blocked with his shield Mordread, Magnet Dust activating to keep the creature stuck as he hopped up and activated his armour's Gravity Dust to send him spinning around, rapidly swinging the Ursa by the arm into the ground until it was destroyed.

An Ursa snuck up behind Yang, and Blaze's gravity armour shot him at the beast's head, knocking it onto its back. He landed on a tree, and Yang punched the Ursa in no-man's land hard enough to destroy it.

Somewhere else in the world, a girl in fashionable clothing felt like someone was ripping off her gimmick.

Blaze shoved his sword into an Ursa's chest and revved his sword, dust blasting out to explode inside the Ursa's chest and electrocute it to death, blasting it apart completely.

Yang leapt behind Blaze to block a strike from an Ursa, activating her Semblance to retaliate with a lethal punch that shot the bear back into another bear hard enough to kill them both.

Blaze slashed his massive Fire and Lightning Dust sword through one Ursa, creating a shockwave that sailed through a crowd of Wolf Grimm, eliminating all the ones that didn't leap out of the way. Revving his sword and switching his ammo types to Ice and Gravity, he slammed the ground in front of him with his sword to conjure a massive column of ice, which Yang punched down with a fiery blast of energy to send a spray of icy buckshot and superheated steam at her enemies. Whatever the ice struck found itself becoming far heavier, and whatever the steam engulfed found itself sinking into the earth until its own body couldn't support its weight, crushing itself into nothingness.

Blake spun and slashed the knees of two Ursas from behind, bringing them down to their hands and legs. Blaze aimed his left arm and swung it while firing his whip-sword, wrapping his blade around both of the grimm's necks before looping the blade around itself. With the two firmly in his noose, he fired his arm's gun at one more final Grimm, regular energy Dust blasting a hole in its chest the size of half a person while the recoil threw his arm back, yanking the chain around the two Grimm's necks to snap them completely before slashing them apart.

"You two are pretty brutal," Blake noted.

"It's just how we roll." Yang smiled, hugging her brother close. He didn't know why he loved her tight hugs so much more than his little sister just yet.

They came across a bunch of chess pieces, and they each took one.

Then Ruby and Weiss showed up, and then other characters showed up.

When Blaze saw Pyrrha and Jaune fighting a scorpion Grimm, he considered helping, but then Pyrrha killed it and it was awesome. Then Blaze noticed that Jaune fought using a sword and shield. He grinned and raised his own weapons into the air. "Sword and Board!" He shouted to Jaune like he'd seen someone who supported a football team he also supported.

"Sword and Board!" Jaune shouted back, before noticing what kind of absurdly powerful weapon that guy was swinging around. Blaze's dust sword blade disappeared back into its hilt, and he mounted the hilt back onto his shield, though he didn't fold the shield up or put it away. Not yet.

Blaze noticed Blake looking at him curiously, and Jaune noticed Pyrrha looking at him the same way. "It's a sword and shield-user thing," They explained.

"Do I qualify?" Pyrrha asked, looking at her weaponry, a Javelin and a Shield.

"That's a javelin!" Blaze called over to her.

"I can turn it into a sword and a rifle," Pyrrha explained.

"Still doesn't count!" Blaze insisted.

"Wait, who are we partnered with?" Yang wondered. "I saw Blake first, you and Ruby went together..."

"Then we met Weiss, whose butt I need to kick later." Blaze punched his fists together.

"Oh, really?" Asked Weiss, followed by Ruby.

"Yeah! When we get out of this, you and me, let's fight at five in the afternoon!" Blaze declared.

"Count on it!" Weiss declared back. "I will not let your insult to the Schnee name go unpunished!"

Cardin, absent his weapon and two of his friends, screamed and ran into the scene, pursued by six Wolf Grimm. Jaune and Pyrrha killed those Grimm, but Pyrrha did most of the work, and Jaune just contributed one shield bash and sword swing that directly saved Cardin's life. And so, Cardin gained two things that day: A grudging respect for Jaune, and a massive crush on Pyrrha. The way she moved, the way she killed... It made his inner little killer happy.

Then a big bird Grimm showed up and everyone killed that by working together. Blaze helped by clamping his Ante Up arm's plates to Ruby's Crescent Rose for a second to supercharge it with fire dust, making a huge flaming blade grow out of its regular blade and infusing every bullet it fired with flame until the temporary buff wore off.

After killing the main Grimm, the rest fled.

And so, the children found themselves waiting in the hall, their teams announced.

"Russel Thrush, Cardin Winchester, Jaune Arc, and Pyrrha Nikos. The four of you retrieved the black bishop pieces. From this day forward, you will form Team CARN, led by Pyrrha Nikos!"

"Yeah, as in carnage!" Cardin yelled, punching his fist into another hand.

"I think 'carnation' would be more likely." Pyrrha explained.

"What in tarnation is a carnation?" Russel asked.

"It's a flower... I think." Jaune said.

"Lie Ren, Nora Valkyrie, Angela Albright, Chloe Eunice... The four of you retrieved the white Rook pieces. From this day forward, you will form Team RANE, led by Lie Ren!"

"Great! You're a natural-born leader, Ren!" Nora hugged the love of her life.

"Will I have to start talking more?" He wondered.

"Well, I've had worse dance partners." Chloe smiled.

"I can't dance." Angela shrugged.

She's lying. She can totally dance, trust me. You'll see her dance later and it's jaw-dropping. Keep reading.

"And for the first time ever at Beacon, we have had one too many new recruits." Ozpin explained, and Jaune grew nervous.

"One who some might say doesn't belong. One who has nowhere else to go."

Blaze tightened a fist he held at his side.

"That is why one team will have five members. Ruby Rose, Blake Belladonna, Blaze Rose, Weiss Schnee, and Yang Xiao Long. The five of you retrieved the white knight pieces. From this day forward, you will work together as... Team RWBBY! Led by... Ruby Rose!"

The crowd cheered at the unusual occasion, and Yang and Blaze hugged their sibling. "I'm so proud of you!" Yang shouted.

"You're going to be the best leader ever!" Blaze started to tear up. "And I'm so glad we get to be together!"

Weiss seemed normal but thought about how she was going to kick Blaze's butt later today.

Blake wondered if she left the stove on.

"This will be an interesting year," said Ozpin.

"You have no idea." Cinder smiled evilly at the camera elsewhere, surrounded by mountains of stolen dust in a massive criminal den full of thugs armed with massive stolen weapons.

"Who are you talking to?" Mercury asked.

"Shut up." She ordered.


	7. Weiss VS Blaze!

Getting Team CARN's room set up just the way they liked it was alright. It was just some bunk beds and a room full of gym equipment Cardin quickly ordered from everyone. Well-paid black kids carried the heavy junk and set it down wherever it seemed to fit. His huge family was all Huntsmen and Huntresses, so he was carrying even more cash than Weiss Schnee, even if her family was richer than his.

"Gotta say, Jaune, when I first saw you, I thought to myself... What a loser! There's no way this shrimpy little clown could ever get into Beacon. Not in a million years!" Cardin folded his arms.

"Uh..." Jaune wasn't sure what to say.

"But when I saw you rush in with that shield at just the right time, it all clicked into place... You're a thief, right? Sneaky and agile."

"I've never stolen anything, I swear!" Jaune insisted.

"Yeah, and neither have I!" Cardin winked. "You carry a shield to throw people off but a sword is just a bigger knife. Man, if you know how to pick locks, we are gonna get into so much trouble together!"

"Absolutely not!" Pyrrha declared. She thought it would have been nice for someone else to be the leader. It would have been nice to backseat-lead that team, let someone else focus on thinking for what everyone else should do, and focus solely on winning her fights wherever her master put her on the battlefield. But now, she needed to lead this team herself. Which meant it needed to be in tip-top condition! "I'm famous, whether I like that or not. All eyes will be on us, from the schoolteachers and school cameras to the paparazzi sneaking into Beacon. Any deviancy in my team will be noticed and it will get us all punished! We must all be upstanding members of society. Where is Russel?"

"Calling his mom to tell him he finally made it to Beacon. What a loser!" Cardin laughed. "Just because his dad's dead doesn't mean he needs to try so hard to make his mom happy."

"Well, find him and take him to the Beacon Gym with us." Pyrrha declared. "Every spare second we don't spend studying is a second we'll spend training!"

"Aw man! Can't we take it easy and find some loser to do all our homework?" Cardin asked.

"Is that the kind of man you want to be?" Pyrrha asked.

Cardin's manhood felt attacked. "No." He said shamefully. He'd never win the heart of the lovely Pyrrha like this! He needed to be as tough as she wanted him to be.

"Jaune, you want to be a hero like your grandfather, who fought in the war, yes?" Pyrrha asked.

Jaune nodded.

"Then it's time for hardcore training! We're going to become the best team in this academy!"

Russel rushed into the room. "Guys, Weiss is fighting some guy with a huge sword in the main garden!"

They followed him and rushed to see it.

Meanwhile, the best team in the entire academy was outside in the main garden, watching two of their members square off. Team RANE and a bunch of black kids nobody knew were also there. They were all cheering and shouting as Weiss and Blaze began to fight.

"Kick her butt, Blaze!" Ruby shouted.

"You said you don't think my blade could pierce your armour, correct?" Weiss coldly asked Blaze.

"Good memory! Can you remember who mishandled dust around who yet?" Blaze laughed.

She zoomed forward and stabbed her sword right into his eye and through the back of his skull.

Blaze screamed in agony, Jaune screamed in horror, Blaze fell to his knees, and Jaune threw up over Chloe.

Everyone's attention was brought back to the fight as Blaze started to chuckle.

"Not bad," Blaze grinned through the pain, turning his head to wrench the blade out of her hands. "Here's your reward!" He yelled, sweep-kicking her down before leaping back elbow-first into her gut, his still-impaled head stabbing its blade into her eye so they matched.

Weiss screamed in pain from the skewering, but aura quickly numbed that pain and left her furious, struggling to get out from under him with the blade keeping their heads stuck together.

"Woah, cool! He doesn't care about pain at all! Is your brother a psycho or something?" Nora asked Ruby.

"No! He just tries really hard to smile through the pain." Ruby explained.

"He isn't the fastest, so he built a fighting style all around defending himself and counterattacking people who hit him first." Yang explained. "He doesn't like getting hurt, but he's got a lot of aura, so he can take it."

"Wait, they're both fine?! ...Oh, right, aura." Jaune remembered aura existed again.

"Do you have a medical disorder, Vomit Boy?" Chloe asked him, gas blasting him into a wall before whipping her wind around herself to clean herself and throw his vomit back at him. To add insult to injury the scent smelled like rotting fish. Far away, Blake covered her nose at the smell even though it was so faint from here.

"You might joke, but Aura Amnesiac Disorder is a rare and serious condition that affects one in five idiots." Angela explained. "It causes people to forget they have aura and forget to keep their aura up during fights. Lost limbs, sudden deaths, forgetting to use a Semblance when it would be extremely useful... Studies show that it would affect one in three Huntsmen and Huntresses if the people with it didn't keep dying suddenly and messing with the statistics. It's only rare because most with it are already dead."

Blaze reached up and fiddled with Myrtenaster's (Weiss's sword) controls until he successfully zapped the two with a blast of Ice Dust that froze both of their heads to the ground. And then he turned his Double Down dust gauntlet on her, punching an electrical discharge into her that zapped the grass beneath and around them into a vicious charred black.

Weiss tapped the ground a few times, signalling defeat. Yang came over and pulled Weiss's swords out of their heads, fiddling with its controls until she got it to swing a slash of fire at her ice, melting it.

"Best two out of three!" Weiss demanded.

"You're on!" He yelled and they walked fifteen paces from another before starting to fight once more.

This time, Weiss zoomed around Blaze before stabbing him in the back of the head and retreating before he could counterattack. He rubbed the back of his head and she exploited a tiny unarmoured weakness in his armour to stab him in the armpit. She kept zooming around him, and to defend himself, he formed an overly long twenty foot katana blade of lightning dust with his Excaliber and started spinning the hilt around his own head like a helicopter blade, keeping her at bay. So she formed some glyphs on the ground that shoved him into a tree, knocking him down. She zoomed close and stabbed his head again and again, but he grabbed her leg with his gun-arm and blasted an electric dust shot right into the "It's funny when it happens to guys and funnier when it happens to chicks" zone. That shot hurt so much, her dad felt it. She keeled over and whispered "Why?" with an incredibly high voice, and he hopped to his feet and lifted his massive blade to stab her, only for her to swing her blade with Ice Mode active and create some icicles to stab him in the It Only Happened Once But Team CFVY Will Never Live This Down zone.

Both fighters were left on the ground, rolling around and making pained noises for a while.

"Want to call this one a draw?" Yang wondered.

"Fine!" The two fighters squealed, getting up once more.

Weiss resumed her usual strategy of zooming around like a butterfly on crack and stinging like a bee on even more crack, and Blaze wished his armour could change dust types like his sword and shield and gun-arm and sword-enhancer arm could. That would let him switch his gravity dust over to electricity dust and shock anyone who got too close! Or maybe he could develop a new weapon, perhaps a Dust Necklace that would shove different raw Dust crystals into his body on command to make him stronger or faster or whatever! Or maybe...

While Weiss became a blur that rushed around him, he looked at the crowd and saw a jaw-droppingly beautiful girl with wings, Angela.

Maybe he needed a pair of wings.

Weiss started to flick icicles at Blaze using her sword, and he blocked them all with his shield, its Magnet Dust repelling the projectiles back at their source. Weiss dodged them all effortlessly and made it look easy, and she formed a giant ice wall in front of him before slicing it down with a focused fire slash, bringing it down on his head.

Cartridges of Dust in his shield turned and a panel on the front opened up to reveal an extending barrel that shot a fireball at her ice wall, melting it completely. And it shot fireball after fireball at Weiss like a minigun, each one barely missing her as he forced her to keep dodging.

"Did I mention my shield is also a gun?" Blaze laughed. "Only an idiot would carry around a big heavy shield that's JUST a shield, and isn't also a gun! Flying Grimm exist, after all, and any Huntsman or Huntress worth anything needs a ranged option and mobility option!"

Jaune looked down at his sucky loser weapons and felt bad. "Aww."

Weiss scraped the tip of Myrtenaster along the ground as she ice-skated on her Glyphs, painting ice dust onto the ground to form a blizzard that spiralled in closer and closer towards Blaze, threatening to engulf him completely.

Blaze activated his armour's Gravity Dust and rose high into the air, and then he deactivated his sword. He sheathed his sword and his Ante Up gauntlet released its clamps. He deactivated its minigun-cannon and decided to try something unconventional, something he'd never successfully done before. He clamped his Ante Up's metal clamps onto his shield, charging it with an anti-material round of fire dust, the weapon gaining a massive glowing red layer of explosively solid flame dust around it, along with a wreath of flame. And then he activated his armour's gravity dust, sending him rocketing down into the ground Weiss was zooming around, shield-first.

He was burning like a meteor, wreathed in flames, and Weiss stopped her blizzard. She looked at its center, expecting to see a frozen solid Blaze. When she didn't see him, she looked up and saw him headed towards her.

Weiss formed an ice dome around herself, but would it be enough?

"Uh... Maybe we should take cover." Yang decided.

"Hit the deck!" Chloe yelled as everyone ducked, handstanding and farting out an ocean-scented blue gas that spun around them like a domed shield.

Blaze struck the ice dome and the explosion that day would be talked about for decades to come. Everyone survived it, but it destroyed a large portion of the school grounds that needed to be rebuilt, and Ozpin made sure these two superpowered kids did the bulk of the construction work.

At first, Weiss tried to "Supervise", aka sit down and order Blaze around. That made Blaze laugh and sit down next to her, and he told her that if she didn't work, he wouldn't work, and nothing would get done. Not even her attempt at bribing him could get him to budge. First she called him a stubborn idiot, so he said he'd work for her if she paid him a trillion Dustdollars. That shocked her, as her company only made four point five billion Dustdollars a year and her monthly allowance was only half a million Dustdollars per month.

And so, they got to work, complaining all the way. They hated being forced to do more work. But their fight had given them a begrudging respect for one another, and they worked together just fine. Soon enough, Ruby, Blake, and Yang showed up to help the duo clean up the rubble, and then Team RANE and CARN showed up to help as a reward for such an entertaining fight. The two Dust Maniacs enjoyed getting a chance to rebuild part of the school using Earth Dust, and Weiss revealed a hidden talent for fancy architecture while Blaze made sure to keep her grounded and keep the buildings functional, with plenty of defensive features that would aid the castle in the event of a siege. They also rebuilt the greenhouse into a massive thing that could grow food for five Beacon Academies, and rebuilt the student dorms to be even bigger than before. Each room got its own private gym room, private pool, game room, kitchen, bathroom, and battle arena for training and practice fights.


	8. Worldbuilding then Yang punches Cardin

Math class was boring, and so was English class. Everyone there already knew how to speak goodly and count how many bullets they wanted to put into the faces of Grimm! And the answer was AS MANY AS IT TOOK!

But Ozpin still insisted on giving every student a well-rounded education on combat AND unimportant non-combat things like history and science.

And the fast teacher with coffee for blood, unfortunately had a Semblance that allowed him to slow time down for himself and everyone around him, friend and foe alike. Not very suited for direct combat, but great for torture and interrogation. And better for a schoolteacher.

Which meant the kids got to enjoy hours of school lectures in just a single hour of real time. Truly, this was a fantasy world everyone wishes they were in.

Today they learned that the world is full of Grimm, and nobody knows who they are or what they want or why they hate humans. They sniff out sadness and are attracted to misery, but they can't sense rage or aggression or good feelings either. They'll kill anyone they see, but they'll smell the miserable and depressed from a million miles away. That's why instead of miserable funerals that attract Grimm, the world of Remnant has Fun-erals where those left behind party like mad and celebrate the life of the fallen.

The world is protected from the Grimm by Huntsmen and Huntresses, travelling badasses who kill stuff and do cool stuff for whoever hires them.

The kids were also told that there are four special super-powerful Hunters known as The Maidens. There were four of them, and there have always been four for as long as anyone has ever known. Nobody knows who they will become, but whenever one dies, a newborn girl would soon obtain this power. But any fool who tried to kill the Maidens, hoping to steal this power and have a kid shortly after, would be a fool, like an ant convinced it could kill an elephant alone.

The Church of Beacon has a lot of holidays, but on Maiden Day, every May the Seventh, that's when the people of the world (but mostly this country) bring their kids to the Church of Beacon. On that day, Inquisitors test young girls with a set of toys. If they choose the correct set of toys, ones that the previous Maiden chose in her past life, then this child would be one of the Maidens, and she would one day unlock her power after a great deal of training. One Maiden is also able to sense the presence of another, so whenever there is a false positive, one Maiden is very easily able to tell when they're around someone who isn't a Maiden.

This was all stuff every kid already knows by the time they're kids.

At Political Science class, also taught by the coffee maniac, they learned about how the world works.

The Church of Beacon is a massive church that rules over the land of Vale, and their second largest and best-defended church has the best combat school in the world. Their number one largest church has Huntsmen guards and teaches civilians how to do important things like build robots, build weapons, and so on. They are only taught combat as a minor thing, not as their main field of study. Many Huntsmen get jobs working for Beacon's "Totally-not-an-army" army known as The Inquisitors. These Huntsmen are cops, heroes, they track down enemies and spy on foes, they help out with charity, they investigate crimes, they patrol the lands to keep the peace, and they kill any who threaten the peace. And many more Huntsmen go solo to be hired as heroes by this Adventurer's Guild or that one, since they pay better, even though their work isn't always morally squeaky-clean.

The kids were taught that all Adventurer's Guilds are terrible shady things you should never work for and only life as a Church of Beacon member would grant you true fulfillment in life. And that was Ruby Rose's goal in life: To become a great Inquisitor just like her mother.

Vacuo is an overpopulated desert hell full of Faunus and massive deadly Grimm and total jerks. It has no ruler, and the only royal decree is that anybody who tries to take over gets killed for it by everyone else. The only law is that you can break whatever laws you want except for rule number one. A while back, there was a world war where Menagerie declared war and the worst Faunus in all the lands started killing humans and demanding preferential treatment to humans in the land of the human. The Faunus lost this war, and this continent was where many countries sent their Faunus. And their criminals. But the criminals banded together with the Faunus and founded a society that functions, in an unorthodox manner. Now it's a country of bandits.

Atlas didn't send its Faunus away after the war, it enslaved them all. Even the good guys who refused to fight, unless they were also in the military at the time fighting the Faunus. Many businesses these days phased out slaves in favour of robotic workforces, sending slave faunuses onto the streets with their 'freedom' to become hobos and assassins. But good old Jaques Schnee still uses slaves out of tradition, because a Faunus killed his eldest daughter, a mistress of ice magic and potential Maiden known as Wynn Schnee. Her death turned Jaques almost as cold as his second-eldest daughter, Winter Schnee, who became leader of the Atlas Military.

Weiss demanded to know why they were bringing up her family's history in a lesson about the world, and the coffee-blooded teacher said "Because I'm about to get into all the military battles she won!"

And so he went on that tangent for many hours and it was very dull to everyone except Blaze, who loved hearing about wars and all the cool tricks and tactics and weapons used. The war between Menagerie and Atlas had been raging on for a hundred years, but ever since Winter Schnee took over, things got hardcore and Atlas finally started to gain ground!

Finally, the lesson talked about Menagerie, the country all Faunus come from. It used to be a nice place, but then a coup happened and the White Fang took over. Overpopulation, terrible leadership, and gulags turned the place into an absolute hellhole. It's so bad, some Faunus actually flee to Atlas to escape it! Menagerie has been at war with Atlas for a long time, and the White Fang are an evil terrorist group who don't have the best intentions of Faunus at heart and just want to conquer the world. You can tell because they love blowing buildings up and killing innocents. Anyway, they only lasted for so long in the war against the technologically-superior Atlas because Atlas believes in Elitism, and ensuring only a small elite force can represent you on the battlefield. Meanwhile, Menagerie is overpopulated and has government buildings where new generations of Faunus soldiers are... Mass produced. They have a seemingly neverending supply of soldiers on their side, but terrible weapons and little dust. Unfortunately, someone somewhere is supplying these monsters with weapons, prolonging and profiting from the conflict.

Mistral used to exist but Grimm conquered it completely with no survivors besides Lie Ren and Nora.

Most of the kids there already knew most of this, but now, they knew everything.

Eventually, they got to the combat class, taught by the moustache guy. He went into a big speech about how Aura is amazing and Weapons are powerful but Semblances can make or break a Hunter. And completely destroy one by training him or her to overly rely on his Semblance, a thing that consumes Aura when used, which is something a Hunter needs to survive life-ending attacks.

Some kids thought about their Semblances and how great they were. Some kids with crap Semblances wished they had better ones, but felt good when the moustache man said people with terrible and no Semblances have an advantage over those who rely on their magical cheating ability. Some kids without Semblances wished they'd discover their powers some day.

Moustache Teacher declared that the two strongest kids in class, with the two strongest Semblances in the class, must fight now. And so, Cardin was chosen to fight against Yang.

The two fighters made their way to the center of the classroom's arena and readied their weapons.

"I'll try to go easy on you," Yang smiled. "But no promises."

"Trust me, you'll be easy. The chicks always are with me." Cardin smirked like a jerk and let his weapon hang loose. His eyes seemed to flash white for a moment as he looked deeply into her eyes, making Yang blink her eyes in pain. "Come on, babe, I'll give you the first shot."

"Your loss," Yang said and activated her Semblance. Hair igniting, eyes turning red, she slugged him in the face.

Everyone expected her fist to send Cardin flying across the room, maybe even through walls. But instead...

However, her punch did... Nothing?

She quickly punched Cardin's face with her other arm to make sure that he was real. He was real, and...

It was as if she couldn't hurt him at all.

In fact, she suddenly felt... Weak. Her arms felt heavy, her eyelids felt tired, she struggled to keep her knees from buckling as the weight of her own body pressed down.

Was he even real?

She spun around for a kick, tried an elbow strike, tried a knee strike, she even tried grabbing one of his arms and trying to judo throw him, but nothing worked.

"What's going on?!" Jaune yelled.

"Yang! Are you okay?" Ruby was concerned.

"Wang Suck Dong! Stop screwing around and break his face!" Blaze roared. But deep down he was also incredibly concerned.

Yang punched Cardin in the face, the chest, even in one of his kneecaps, which made Nora grin. Yang tried getting behind him and kicking the back of his knee, she tried punching the back of his head where skull met spine, she even tried grabbing him and trying to suplex him. But to her horror, she couldn't lift him.

"No..." Yang gasped. It was just like one of those nightmares she had sometimes where she lost fights, only with one guy instead of a hundred.

He turned around and folded his arms. "Given up yet?"

Blaze thought tactically. "If he was absorbing the damage like she can, then she would still be able to lift him. He's weakened her somehow... Did he poison her food? Or is this his Semblance?"

She crouched down and tried punching him in Salem's Doorbell, but not a single blow of hers seemed to do anything.

And the sound... She barely heard anything when her fists struck his body.

Yang's semblance deactivated.

"Have you figured it out yet?" Cardin grinned. "My Semblance makes the people I fight into weaklings! Only one at a time, if they look me in the eyes, and only for a short while..."

He grabbed Yang's right forearm and forced her to punch herself in the face. She'd never felt so helpless before.

"But just long enough. Don't worry, baby, your aura can still protect you. It just can't do anything to enhance your strength, since my Semblance is keeping it weak, no matter what you do! Don't expect to jump fifty times your height any time soon, either! My Semblance is called Strongman, because it makes me the only strong man around!"

He punched her in the face, and she expected to be sent to the ground by it, but she was only sent a few feet back by the blow. He was stronger than he looked... But her defenses were still intact. Her confidence partly restored, she began a flurry of boxing punches and he matched her in speed, both fighters punching each other's face with gusto and fury.

She was planning, and she was certain that as soon as she'd absorbed enough damage from his punches, she'd be able to retaliate with a brutal punch that would take him out in one shot. After all, he could suppress her strength, but could he suppress his own?

When the time came for her to activate her Semblance and give him a blazing slug to the face, she learned that yes, he could limit the strength of any enemy of his, even if she was using his own strength against him.

"No..." Yang realized she was running out of options.

"Fight me two-on-two later!" Blaze yelled. He'd already figured out the weakness in the bully's powers, and if he needed eye contact and a single target, he just had to overwhelm the foe through sheer numbers. "Me and Yang against you and Jaune!"

"What? Why me?" Jaune asked.

"Because you know better than to mess with Yang when she's angry!"

"True." He nodded.

"I'm more the kind of guy to focus on the here and now." Cardin smiled. With his free arm, he swung his mace up at her skull. She dodged like a boxer, having still retained that skill, even if her strength had been robbed from her by this cheating dirtbag. She retaliated with one, two, three, four punches to the face, yet he didn't bother dodging them because he knew they'd be nothing at all. It was like a baby smacking its fists against a massive punchbag.

And then she recognized that he was too overconfident in his Semblance, and shot him in the face with both her gauntlets at once.

That legitimately hurt him, sending him stumbling back in pain.

Recognizing that while her strength might be fading fast, her Dust still worked, she started to lay into him with punch after punch, all enhanced by her Dust bullets.

He guarded his face with an armoured arm and she decided to try out an upgrade Blaze Rose had given her gauntlets.

She crouched down and flicked a hidden switch on her right Gauntlet, and the weapons unfolded further, spiked panels slamming together to form spiked gauntlets to protect her fists, while gaining dual-facing jets that could just as easily enhance her swings with Fire Dust and the force of a jet engine or unleash flamethrower hell onto her enemies. Or charge themselves with Lightning Dust for some shocking stunning action or a precise bolt of lightning across distances that would make Crescent Rose blush.

Already impressive, even without the other enhancement. With the sound of one, two, three shotgun blasts, she charged three shots of Gravity Dust aura into her fist before slamming it up into Cardin's gut.

The bully was launched high into the ceiling and where he landed on the ceiling, he found himself stuck.

"Help! Help!" Cardin yelled, helpless.

"What's the matter? Can't your Semblance bail you out?" Yang grinned.

His aura flickered and left him completely.

"This match is over!" The moustached teacher announced. "Yang is the winner!"

Everyone cheered her except for Cardin's team, who clapped politely.

"Way to go, Yang!" Ruby yelled.

"I knew you could do it!" Blaze yelled.

"Did you learn any lessons from today's fight."

"Yeah, I hope I don't become a loser who relies on his Semblance way too much like this guy!" Yang grinned.

Cardin looked up at Pyrrha hopefully, but she was looking down in shame. She had a fool for a teammate, she realized.

Hatred burned in Cardin's eyes as he glared at the new object of his rage... Yang, that blonde woman he would hate forever!


	9. Her

Team RWBBY were taking their stuff out of their lockers, while praising the heck out of Yang.

"You were amazing, Yang!" Ruby yelled.

"You kicked his butt!" Blaze yelled. "My upgrades are the best in the world!"

"It was admirable, I suppose." Said Weiss.

Blake said nothing. She seemed troubled.

"I hope you like that upgrade, because it's the last one I'm giving out until I get my shield to work properly." Blaze said.

"Work properly?" Blake asked, amused. "It's a shield."

"Yeah, a shield that's also a gun!" Blaze smiled. "And it's supposed to do something else, but I haven't been able to get that feature working right just yet."

Yang opened her locker, which had most of its space taken up by her motorcycle, a spare change of clothes just in case, no books, and many balloons full of pink paint which burst open, engulfing her completely and drenching her.

She heard laughter and cleaned the gunk from her eyes, seeing Cardin and his stupid friend laughing at her. Pyrrha and Jaune weren't there.

"There you go! Now you're pink, like a nice little girly girl should be!" Cardin laughed.

Elsewhere, the pencil Nora was writing in her diary with snapped. "I don't know why, but I think I'll break Cardin's legs tomorrow." She said.

The paint on Yang was sticky, and thick, and cold, and disgusting...

"Go make out with your loser pet Faunus later!" Cardin yelled.

"Oh no! How did you find out that I'm a faunus?!" Blaze yelled, shocking Blake.

"You're not a Faunus, she is!" Cardin pointed at Blake. "Stop covering for your pathetic crush. You think nobody's noticed the bow on her head twitching now and then? She's a house cat! Besides, I can smell a dumb animal like her from a mile away!"

Blaze passed Blake his Excaliber Dust Blade, making it form a serrated knife made of thunder dust. "Make it hurt."

But she shook her head and deactivated the weapon before passing it back to him. "He isn't worth it. Violence won't teach him anything."

"Like hell it won't!" Blaze laughed. "This is a violent world full of violent idiots, and the only thing anyone understands is violence, weapons, and very rarely, music!"

Yang had a tactically brilliant idea, grabbing some paint from her body and throwing it in Cardin's face. Blinded, there was no way he would be able to use his Semblance on her.

And enraged, there would be no way he'd be able to defeat her.

She launched herself at him with a double back-blast from her gauntlets before punching Cardin to the ground, mounting him, and beating the stupid out of him.

"DON'T! MESS! WITH! ME!" She punched and punched like mad, and Cardin couldn't do a thing to stop her.

"Hey, don't you think he's learned his lesson by now?" Cardin's idiot friend tried to pull Yang off her, only to get punched right in his Ozpins.

Jaune and Pyrrha walked in, and saw their teammate getting beaten down and destroyed. Pyrrha unfolded her weapon and fired a warning shot into the sky, getting everyone's attention and ceasing the beatdown. "What is the meaning of this?!"

"Your idiot teammate filled my sister's locker with pink paint!" Blaze yelled. "Then he called my Faunus teammate an animal! Is that the kind of team you're leading? A bunch of dumb racist cowards and punks?!"

Blake silently thanked god for Blaze not telling her exactly who the Faunus was.

Pyrrha was angered, at first. And then...

"Russel, did you help with this?" She asked.

"Only because he said he'd kick my butt if I didn't!"

She frowned. "Team RWBBY, he did this without my permission or knowledge. How you choose to punish these two... Is up to you. Provided you allow them two hours a day to train, to make sure their skills don't atrophy any further."

And that was how these two dolts ended up beaten until their auras broke, and then got until they got bruises and broken limbs. It took hours for their aura to recover and heal their broken limbs. After that, they were forced to clean up Yang's motorcycle while she supervised. And then they were forced to clean all the many, many in-progress weapons in Blaze's workshop, a room that would normally be his bedroom if he didn't sleep with Ruby. In a bunk bed in her room, of course. They weren't kids any more.

And when the time came for Cardin and Russel's training, their training was like Dodgeball. Except instead of dodging thrown balls, they were forced to dodge the attacks of Team RWBBY for two hours straight with no armour, just big pink pyjama onesies with animal ears, since Cardin hated Faunuses so much. Both had little kitty ears and, as extra punishment, these two boys also had to wear these onsies at all time. Even when eating food at the cafeteria and even when attending lessons! When asked why they were dressed like this, they were forced to answer "It's a form of psychological training".

A few days of cleaning and being laughed at by absolutely everyone later, the idiot duo of Cardin and Russel started to realize something as they cleaned all sorts of wacky nonsense in Blaze's workshop.

"Man, some of these weapons are really stupid." Cardin said as he polished a pair of nunchuck-sniper rifles.

"I know." Russel said as he polished a shield that could unfold into a bigger shield.

"And some of them are awesome!" Cardin yelled as he picked up a pair of nunchuck-miniguns. "If we got some dirt on that Blaze guy and forced him to upgrade our weapons, we'd be unstoppable!"

"But how do we get dirt on him? He's so squeaky-clean and normal-sounding..." Russel thought. "I don't think anything about him stands out, except for the bright red and gold colour scheme."

"That just means he's hiding some massive secret!" Cardin insisted. "He probably tortures cats to feel better whenever he gets mad!"

"Like you?" Russel asked.

"Yeah!" Cardin insisted. "Only he's weirder, so he probably tortures puppies too! I'd never do that, puppies are too cute. Cats can go to hell though. When we're done here, let's do some snooping."

And so, eight hours of cleaning later, it was midnight. They sneaked into Beacon's data room and Russel used his hacking knowledge to break into their computer room.

And when they got to Blaze's files...

"What the hell is this?" Russel shrieked.

"Oh, this is big!" Cardin grinned. "I can't believe who his parents are!"

"We have to tell everyone! Now!" Russel started to get so nervous, he looked like he was about to wet himself.

"No... We have to blackmail him with this!" Cardin insisted. "He'd do anything to keep this knowledge hidden!"

And so, tomorrow, they got in Blaze's way as he left Team RWBBY's dorm rooms to head for the showers. Right there, Cardin threatened to blackmail Blaze with the fact that he was an orphan-

"Big whoop, tons of people are orphans." He said.

He slept with his sister every night-

"In a bunk bed! Check her room yourself, her bed has three bunks. One for her, one for me, and one for Yang since she turned her own room into a garage for her dumb motorbike. Can you believe she won't let me upgrade it? She says she'll buy me my own motorbike when I'm older but I want one now."

And they both knew who his parents were.

Blaze grew cold upon hearing that.

"Hey, Cardin. I've been meaning to ask... Do you mind if I test my shield's upgrades out on you? I think you're the only kid in class with more aura reserves than me or Yang. So you can take it."

"I know what your shield does, dweeb, it uses dust and it's got a cannon in it."

"With the fire rate of a minigun when I get serious!" Blaze said proudly. "But there's something else it can do, and I'm ready to start testing that out."

He unfolded his weapons, readied his shield, and just like that, fire dust started to swirl around the shield. That dust split apart to form shapes, simple four-pointed two-dimensional arrow shapes.

Cardin got his weapon out, The Executioner, a heavy mace with titanium flanges and a Fire Dust crystal in the center.

"When I get this working properly, these bad boys will look like swords. They'll work like swords, too. And they'll be able to form the shape of any weapon, block attacks, and slash foes apart for me while I do other attacks. The perfect weapon for simultaneous attack and defense. But you know what would be really great? If I could somehow absorb the impact of attacks that strike this shield, and then channel that force into automatic attacks from dust weapons made by my shield! I suspect it'll take me years to get this working properly. But for now..." Blaze said, and watched these triangles fly into Cardin and explode on impact, blasting him back. Each one had the explosive power of a small grenade, but when they all struck you at once, you went flying. More triangles formed around his shield and took turns kamikazeeing themselves into the pinned and trapped boy, a neverending barrage of pain.

Russel drew his sets of daggers and stabbed Blaze in the neck with them, stunning him with Semblance-boosted lightning dust and tazing him constantly. Blaze screamed and went down, and his shield stopped making dust weapons as electricity locked up his muscles.

Blaze started relying on the combat training his sister had given him, a sweep kick trying to knock Russel down. He leapt up to dodge the attack like an acrobat, slashing his blades up through Blaze's face along the way. But with the electric dust gone from his system, Blaze could grin through the pain and fight once more.

Blaze unleashed a bladed whip from his right gauntlet and flailed it like a lunatic, filling the space around him with blades that whipped and sliced at Russel, each strike dealing small amounts of damage.

Cardin swung his Executioner Mace at Blaze and struck him in the chest, blasting him far away and nearly taking him down in one shot.

"Ow..." Blaze whispered as he got up. "I don't think I can take another hit... I hope you don't throw that at me!"

Cardin grinned and threw his Executioner Mace at Blaze, but the boy genius weaponsmith readied his shield and reflected the attack with a blast of Gravity Dust, sending the weapon back at Cardin. The big guy yelped and dove to the side to evade it, and the weapon flew through a glass window and left the Beacon building to fall somewhere on school grounds.

Blaze then drew his sword and clamped his Ante Up gauntlet onto his blade, amplifying the explosive fire dust blade with a corona of golden stunning thunder. His bladed whip grabbed Russel and pulled him close to his gun-arm, Double Down, which fired a powerful Fire Dust shot point-blank into his chest and sent him flying across the incredibly long Beacon hallway and into Cardin. With that attack, Russel was down for the count, aura breaking.

Cardin started to get up, throwing his teammate off him.

"Your team sucks!" Blaze yelled, exhausted, yet still angry. He shook his shield, trying to get it to form Fire Dust weapons again. A few slams with the palm of his hand later, and it finally worked properly, forming sharp triangles and sending them flying into Cardin. These explosive attacks blew the much larger boy away and pinned the much larger boy to the wall, as Blaze menacingly stalked towards his foe.

Blaze sent out his left gauntlet's whip-sword to whip around his foe's neck and hang him high.

"How did you even get into Beacon, you dumb, cowardly brute? Don't they have psych evaluations before you're allowed in? Big whoop, you're a big strong guy with a big weapon." He readied his Excaliber sword and charged yet another 50MG cartridge of Dust into it, adding a larger and sharper scythe-shaped layer of blazingly explosive fire dust to the lightning-coated fire dust blade. One strike from that oversized dust monstrosity would end it all. "MINE! IS! BIGGER!"

"Stop!" Shouted Blake Belladonna. "Don't kill him!"

"I won't kill him. Aura, remember?" Blaze smiled. "I won't chop his head off, I'll stab his lung. I'm just going to give him a few dozen months in the intensive care unit. No big deal."

"That's still too much!"

"He's gone too far this time!" Blaze shouted at her, enraged. "He says he knows who my parents are!"

"Ozpin..." Cardin choked out.

Blaze yanked his whip-sword up, choking Cardin harder. "No, idiot, Ozpin is not my father. You can tell because I look nothing like him!"

"Knows!" Cardin squealed.

Blake shot Cardin in the face with a Sleeping Dust cartridge, knocking him out.

"Hey!" Blaze yelled, swinging his arm to throw Cardin to the ground and retract his whip-sword. "I was being all cool and scary!"

"That isn't cool! Fear isn't strength!" Blake snapped. "Forget what he was saying to you, what you were about to do to him... It would change you. Putting someone in the hospital isn't a line you can uncross."

"I know," Blaze shrugged. "I've crossed it before. I've even killed before, accidentally."

"DON'T JOKE ABOUT THAT!" Blake screamed tearfully.

"You think I'm joking?" Blaze chuckled, tears welling up in his eyes. "How many people do you think have had a problem with some dumb little orphan-boy hanging around with the child of the legendary Summer Rose? Not to mention, living with a beauty like Yang. Do you know how many stalkers she has? Or rather, had? How many crazed fanboys do you think wish they were in my shoes right now? Angry teenagers, crazy adults... Do you remember how many stalkers Yang has had to beat up, because they all think they're entitled to her if they buy her enough gifts or offer her enough creepy car rides to grown-up bars where they buy her whatever drinks she wants? I'm pretty sure my number's not as big as hers, because she lets her stalkers come back for round two after some time in the hospital. I don't. I leave them with damage and make it clear why they shouldn't mess with me. I've stabbed organs, I've broken bones, I've even cut limbs off. But my first kill? That was first time I got jumped by a bunch of twenty-something Huntsmen. I was just nine at the time. I did my best to fight them off, but we all had aura, we all had weapons, I only managed to knock one of them out before one of them grabbed my arms and held them behind me, and I knew I could only send them running if I did something scary. So I forced myself to laugh like a madman, I said a bunch of stupid evil nonsense in a big screamy growly voice, and I shoved my Excaliber's fire dust blade into the knee of the guy holding me. The explosion... Have you ever seen what happens when you force air into a watermelon, Blake? Because that was nothing compared to the explosion when I shoved my fire blade into his face. I felt like crying, I felt like throwing up, but I forced myself to laugh and smile through the pain and sound like I was having fun. I needed those monsters to think that if they didn't run, I was going to have even more fun with them. So they ran, and I was left alone beside a dead body to laugh and laugh until I cried."

Blake rushed forward and hugged him tight.

"What the hell?" Blaze asked. "I thought you were about to fight me."

"No. You... understand." She hugged him tighter. "You understand what nobody else can."

Blaze chuckled. "What, did you accidentally kill someone too?"

"...Long ago, yes." She whispered.

His mirth left him. "Oh my god. I'm so sorry, I... Let me make it up to you, I'll upgrade your sword for free tomorrow if you want."

"Forget weapons!" She protested. "Forget about fighting and killing and everything else I hate about this world. Let's just... go back to our room, read some books together, and let this guy wake up alone."

Blaze had never seen her so emotional... He didn't get the sense that she was in love with him, or anything like that. Instead, he got the sense that she understood what he went through. And she seemed to hope that when she was ready to tell him what she had gone through, he would understand.

To his surprise, he found himself forming a bond with her over that almost instantly. He didn't have to pretend around her. He didn't have to smile when he felt blue, not around someone with misery in her past.

"Sure." Blaze smiled reassuringly, and had an idea. "And I know just where he should wake up."

And that was how Cardin ended up awakening outside Beacon, dangling from a flagpole outside by his underwear, an enraged and screaming brute demanding to be let down. The underwear was over his cat onesie, and a stupid Faunus shirt that said "Rawr! That means I love you in Lion!" was now over his cat onesie too.


	10. Yang beats Ruby and Blaze

Team RWBBY was never bothered by Cardin again after that day. In fact, Team RWBBY found themselves with three surprises tomorrow.

Their first surprise? "To promote a more efficient work environment", all schoolchildren at Beacon got Wednesdays off, to spend however they pleased. Reading, gaming, exercising, training, or even just talking with their teammates, you could do anything on a Wednesday except leave school grounds. You were allowed to do that on weekends.

Their first surprise, Blaze and Blake were reading silently together in the team's living room, on couches set up to face and touch each other.

"Aww, he made a friend!" Yang cooed.

"Don't ruin the moment." Blake flatly said to her.

"Well, I'm just glad our team is finally getting along." Weiss snooted, nose high in the air. "We already have Pyrrha's team beat in numbers. Now, we simply need to train until we have her beat in terms of strength."

"What's your beef with Pyrrha?" Yang asked.

"She's famous, she was born strong, and she whines about how much that sucks for her." Weiss explained. "Her father is the King of Atlas, not that he does much of anything these days after the corrupt aristocracy limited his power, gave him an excuse to do nothing all day, and gave my father the right to do whatever she wants. Doesn't she realize how great she has it? No family troubles and no company to worry about inheriting. Just a meaningless princess title that will one day become a meaningless queen title. Sure, she might have to marry someone she doesn't love one day, but big whoop! Tons of people have had that forced on them ever since Atlas decreed that if a man can't find a girl by the time he's twenty five a girl will be assigned to him. Her parents are fully supportive of her becoming the strongest warrior she could be. She talks about being put on a pedestal and seeming invincible because she uses her Semblance to cheat at fights, but she-"

"Wait, she cheats?" Yang asked.

"Yes! Do you know how many of her foes conveniently miss swings that would have normally struck true? Not every fight she ever won thanks to that can be chalked up to nerves!" She insisted.

"Maybe they just get distracted by her big, beautiful Pyrrhas!" Blaze laughed, and Ruby laughed and shoved him.

"Oh, please. If that worked on everyone, your older sister would be one of the world's strongest fighters, not just the second-most aura-filled one in school." Weiss rolled her eyes.

Yang grinned.

Weiss blushed fiercely. "N-not that I've noticed them, or anything! I mean, of course I've noticed them! How could I not notice your... Personalities... with the way you shamelessly flaunt them?"

"Hey, people will notice them either way." Yang shrugged, grinning and deciding not to talk about how being beautiful sucked for her. All the friends she lost as a kid once her body blossomed and jealous girls turned their backs on her, and all the trouble she got into once people started trying to win her heart...

"As I was saying, she could stop cheating any time she wants. She has almost everything I ever wanted, it all came so easily to her, and she has the gall to pretend it's some kind of burden thrust onto her! Does she have any idea what it's like to be me?"

"I can't imagine..." Ruby saddened. "I know it sucks now, being too short to reach the cookies on the top shelf, but you'll be taller some day!"

Weiss rolled her eyes. "There are things in life more important than cookies."

"Blasphemy!" Yelled Ruby.

The violent and adorable barbershop quintet headed for their fully-stocked private gym, and left behind the living room that connected their own bedrooms (and in Yang and Blaze's case, their respective Garage and Workshop) to a beautifully large living room that had a TV, a fully stocked kitchen, couches, chairs, shelves full of books, and more.

The gym was spartan and efficient, with polished and varnished wooden floors and a lot of exercise machines. Some mats were in the corner to make falls softer, but who needed those when you had aura?

Blake started naruto-running on a treadmill, Weiss did the same but raised her treadmill's speed so when she Stingered she remained on one spot, and Ruby and Blaze Rose teamed up to take Yang on, neither one able to defeat her alone. Yang evaded Blaze's mightiest weapon attacks or blocked them with her gauntlets, absorbing the power of all his attacks, crimson light flashing on her hands. When Ruby turned to rose petals and flanked her, shooting her in the back with Crescent Rose, Yang blocked those with her offhand without even looking, before punching back a shotgun-sounded blast of punchy goodness at her. Yang could feel the blocked energy building inside her, because her semblance absorbed the damage of any attack she blocked and allowed her to turn it into unleashed damage.

Ruby barely evaded the attack by flying higher, and Blaze got her attention by blasting two charges of lightning dust into his fire sword. The zweihander blade gained an oversized golden corona that now resembled a pillar of lightning on a stick, and he swung it down upon her. She caught it with both hands, the crackling pillar of pain shocking her Semblance and boosting its reserves of power.

Ruby in rose petal form flew up above Yang, ready to swing her scythe down, but Yang ignited, and it was all over.

Her hair aflame, her eyes glowing crimson red, she was ready to end the sparring session.

She unleashed a tenth of her charged energy through her hands to shatter the Dust blade in Blaze's hands before grabbing part of its broken blade and yanking him closer. Helpless, Blaze was pulled closer to Yang, who grabbed him and channelled all of her energy into an uppercut that launched him into Ruby and shot both through the ceiling.

Like arrows sticking out of a wooden target, their heads and upper bodies pierced the rooftops and got them stuck in the teacher's lounge, of all places. Everyone was stunned, except for Ozpin, who seemed amused.

"Hello, Ruby, Blaze." Ozpin greeted.

"Hi, Ozpin!" Ruby and Blaze greeted in unison.

Blaze grabbed Ruby's hand and his other sent out his bladed whip to grab Yang and pull the two closer to her. Throwing all of his force into it, he threw Ruby at Yang, who fired her sniper rifle and prepared to slash down the biggest cut at Yang, getting her like she got the Nevermore raven Grimm.

Yang casually sidestepped, and put her fist in her sister's face, ready to fire.

Blaze stuck his whip blade into the ground and pulled himself towards Yang, charging a blast of Fire Dust into his shield for another explosive fall. It didn't have the air room to build up the speed it had when it destroyed a big chunk of the school, but he was just going to get one girl.

Yang punched the shield and blocked the attack completely, absorbing all that damage without taking any of it. Yang's flaming hair burned harder than it ever had before, and she shoved her other fist into Blaze's face, holding them both up.

"Boop!" She gave her sister and brother a friendly poke, and the three laughed and hugged each other.

Neither of them could beat a powerhouse like Yang right now, but that was fine. That was why they were at Beacon: To grow stronger.

Upstairs, Ozpin watched the fight with a smile and Glynda Goodwitch fixed the ground with her Semblance.

Ruby, Blaze, and Yang decided to hit the exercise machines after that, each one lifting weights that would make an auraless weightlifter drop his jaw.

And Weiss couldn't stop staring at it all.

Tears threatened to well up in her eyes but she dismissed them, her father taught her how to clamp down on her emotions so she wouldn't feel anything. He had that lesson beaten into her early on.

Blake noticed, however. But she decided not to say anything, hoping to let Weiss deal with this on her own.

She wasn't yet ready to come out and say what was wrong to just anyone, not even her own teammates.

Her past held ghosts and her past held misery. A graveyard of sins and mistakes...

Blaze, on the other hand, also noticed Weiss staring at him and his family. But he just assumed it was because all three of them were cute.

Team RWBBY's second surprise came later that day, when they were done exercising and they returned to their room. Yang and Ruby began playing fighting games together, Ruby crushing her elder sister with her superior knowledge of the ancient art of spacing, Weiss read a romance novel hidden behind a bigger book on weapon history, and Blake and Blaze continued to read through the Man With Two Souls series together.

By the time they had gotten to Man With Two Souls 4: 8 Souls 4 Ever, Team RWBBY's second surprise finally came.

It wasn't long before Cardin knocked their door with Pyrrha behind him. While she and everyone else watched, he apologized to Blaze and explained he came from a terrible part of town where people only do good things for other people if it benefits them, and so he felt he had to figure out who Blaze's real parents are if he wanted the boy to upgrade his simplistic flail into something stronger with a proper ranged option. However, now that he thought about it, the names on his Beacon academy file were so ridiculous that it was almost certain that whoever guessed at his parentage had a sick sense of humor and no idea what else he could write on that file. And then he apologized to Blake and explained that even though his war-hero father sacrificed his life to fight Grimm in a doomed Faunus-filled criminal village full of debauchery and sin and drugs, even though he sacrificed himself to grant many humans and Faunus time to flee from the Grimm and flee to safety, even though he was rescued by a beautiful Orphan woman whose parents were killed by the white fang, even though those two bonded and eventually gave birth to Cardin, and even though a White Fang terrorist killed both of Cardin's parents while blowing up a fancy no-Faunus-allowed restaurant they were eating at, it still doesn't give him the right to blame all Faunus for what the White Fang did or for how the White Fang treat humanity.

"Apology accepted, now get out." Blake said coldly, returning to her book.

Cardin silently closed the door and left, with Pyrrha watching him like a hawk from now on.

And so, team RWBY was left to talk to themselves.

"Can you believe that jerk?" Blake snapped, shocking everyone. "_Dear Princess Celestia. Today I learned it's wrong to blame all Faunus for the White Fang._ Of course it's wrong to blame the actions of the White Fang on Faunus! Do you know how many millions of Humans and Faunus, mostly Faunus, were slaughtered by the millions after the White Fang took over with Atlas's help?"

"Hey!" Weiss snapped. "Atlas's people didn't do that, its military didn't do that, its king didn't do that, and the Schnee Dust Company didn't do that. So-called revolutionaries in the royal court did that, hoping they could use Faunus like a weapon to invade Atlas and take over! That's why we had them executed once their coup failed!"

"Who would ever think the White Fang can be used as a weapon?" Ruby wondered. "They're pure evil! One time I was in a weapon shop, and they blew it up! I fell five stories and got pinned under rubble for hours!"

"How did you survive?" Weiss asked.

"Aura." Ruby explained, and shook her fist at God. "But all those beautiful weapons melted into slag by their cruel, evil actions... I will never forgive them!"

Blake stared at her silently.

"Anyway... I heard you were involved in a fight yesterday." Weiss said, "But nobody was willing to elaborate on the details."

"Cardin insulted me and Blake one time too many, so I kicked his butt. And his idiot friend's, when he backstabbed me with a lightning dagger. That hurt way too much for such a weak weapon, I think his Semblance enhances lightning dust. Or maybe all dust, or maybe all attacks from the side, or maybe all attacks that aren't noticed, or maybe all attacks in general. I've heard of at least one person each with a Semblance like that. He's an acrobatic little imp, too. Remember this if you ever want to kick his butt. Anyway, I almost broke the big guy's legs and it was about to be extremely painful for him, but Blake said 'This is not the way' and convinced me to spare his kneecaps and she introduced me to her book collection and we became best friends."

"I thought I was your best friend!" Ruby protested.

"We're siblings and super best friends! I'm way closer to you than her, don't worry." Blaze insisted. "This belly-baring temptress shall never sway my heart from yours!"

"Oh, ok." Ruby smiled.

Blake glared at him. "Temptress? Really?"

"I'm just joking, it's how I get to know people." He explained.

"What was that he said about your parents?" Weiss asked.

"Cardin said he hacked into my Beacon Academy files, and he knew who my real parents are. But I already know who my real parents are! Qrow Branwen and Tai Yang, the men who raised me and taught me to be a better man." Blaze declared, hugging Ruby and Yang close.

"You were raised by two men?" Weiss asked, confused. "That's so gay."

Yang raised an eyebrow. "You got a problem with gayness?"

"No, but where I'm from it's illegal." Weiss explained. "Of course, gayness still happens back home. Everyone just pretends not to notice whenever a couple slips up and kisses in public, and nobody says anything when a single woman and her 'Roommate' start raising an adopted family together. Of course, when couples start making out in front of children at some public park for attention, or dressing in indecent clothing and dancing inappropriately with children atop lewdly shaped parade floats, arrests are made for a reason. There's a difference between being gay and being _gay_ about being gay, after all. If we didn't have laws against that ugliness, those selfish sickos wouldn't go down for making the rest of us look bad."

"Us?" Yang asked with a raised eyebrow.

She blushed. "Not us! I mean, people from Atlas! Not me! I swear I'm not gay!" Weiss insisted, face turning fully red. "Not that there's anything wrong with that, or people who like both. Which certainly isn't me! I've never watched you or Ruby exercise together!"

Blaze laughed. "Here I was, thinking you had some super sad tragic family backstory reason behind staring at us so much! You just think we're cute!"

"I don't think you're cute at all!" Weiss lied with a blush.

"Baby, I'm adorable!" said Blaze, shooting finger guns at her.

"I still can't believe my second day at school was a day off." Ruby admitted. "Beacon is the best!"

"Beacon is bizarre." Weiss said. "Where I'm from, all schools are boarding schools and nobody has weekends off. But summer vacations are more common, and some happen outside of summer. So it all balances out."

"Tomorrow, they're going to start letting us take missions." Blake explained. "But we're a new team, so we should take something simple."

"Nuts to that! I'm taking the coolest mission they've got!" Blaze bragged. "My weapons can handle anything!"

"Except Yang." Blake smiled.

"Hey, show me something she can't break once she's absorbed enough damage! Because after she's absorbed even more damage, she CAN break it! Besides, my Excaliber can just make new blades out of dust, so it's fine."

"Yang is the strongest big sister in the world!" Ruby held up her sister's arm like a champion.

"Aw, you guys!" Yang hugged her siblings tight and started to choke them both. Ruby complained, but Blaze didn't.


	11. Two Boards, Echo, and Existential Dread

When it was time for Team RWBBY to choose their first mission, a sensible group of friends would have chosen something nice and easy.

So the violent and adorable barbershop quintet agreed to choose the toughest mission on the menu.

A bounty.

Maybe if they had a voice of reason in their party, they would have picked something easier. But Blaze always wanted to prove himself, if you got Ruby excited enough, you could talk her into anything, Yang never backed down from a challenge, Weiss was still struggling with her ego and need to outdo Pyrrha and prove to her father she could be cool and strong, and Blake was busy quietly dealing with her own issues, so she avoided confrontations for now even though she felt this was a dumb plan.

There were two bulletin boards students could get their missions from, with some stairs in the middle and some kind of stall on the side.

One board was for all kinds of missions, from rescue requests and escort missions to repair jobs and charity cases. The other board was full of posters containing the names and faces and crimes of people who needed to die or get arrested after you beat the aura out of them, along with an offered reward.

As the group looked for a sufficiently cool and high-paying bounty, Ruby did something.

Ruby wandered over to the stall. It reminded Ruby of a lemonade stand, and it was manned by a pale-skinned twenty four year old woman with blonde hair, red eyes, and a red dress. The sign called this stall "Echo's Friend Area".

"What is this?" Ruby asked.

"I'm Echo! Welcome to Echo's Friend Area!" She greeted robotically like the girls at McDonalds. "What friends would you like to make today?"

"Huh?" Ruby asked.

"Would you like more information?" Echo asked mechanically.

"Yes." Weiss spoke.

"Welcome to Echo's Friend Area! I'm not much of a fighter, but Ozpin saw my potential long ago and took me out of regular training to give me a job here!" She explained. "I hang around here on the clock, and sleep in one of the unused bunks on my breaks and on weekends. I've got a really powerful semblance, and while it's handy on the battlefield, it's far more useful away from the battlefield."

"What is it?" Weiss asked.

"Friend-Making!" Echo smiled.

"That's the strongest power of all!" Ruby smiled, and Blake gagged like she was hacking up a furball.

"No, really! I literally make friends!" Echo grinned. "They take a while to make, that's why I wait here for custom orders I can work on over time. Some people have a Semblance that lets them make more copies of their weapons, or make copies of themselves on the battlefield. But those copies aren't really real, they're just aura. Someone might be able to make a copy of himself run forward to beat someone up, but you can't hold a conversation with that fake copy! Mine is the truest evolution of that type of Semblance. With enough aura, I can create a whole entire person, a real living breathing person that eats and sleeps and fights and thinks and serves you no matter what!"

Everyone's jaws dropped.

"Do they poop?" Blaze asked.

"You bet they do, weirdo!" Echo laughed. She opened up two books on her desk, one showing a list of requests and one filled with a laminated set of pages. She passed him the book, and his teammates crowded around him to see as he flicked through the book. "I can't make anyone older than me, or anyone younger than sixteen, since I was at that age when I got my Semblance. But I can make them look like pretty much anything. Look through the book for some inspiration, these are some of my past successes! All of these fake friends have proven to be invaluable assets on missions!"

Each page held information about different Huntsmen and Huntresses, complete with pictures of them in clothing. But no weapons, and each person's semblance was marked as "None". It reminded Blaze of roleplaying profiles, like the ones he saw that time he and Ruby played Grimm and Gaols back in combat school.

Some pages were stamped with a red X in two circles in the top right corner.

"Ooh, he's cute!" Yang pointed to one page showing the dreamiest guy of all time, someone who could be the star of any boyband with those looks.

They kept turning pages together.

"She would make a fine addition to our team," Weiss pointed at an elegant and refined white-furred Arctic Fox girl Faunus who carried herself with a serene dignity. And the idea of ordering around a girl more beautiful than even her elder sister Winter held its own appeal.

"I want HER!" Blaze practically drooled over a cow girl Faunus whose stomach bore a set of four to surpass what a normal girl had two of. And for good measure, she had two even bigger perky Pyrrhas on top of those where two should normally go.

"Oh, you... Ooh, now THAT'S a katana!" Ruby noticed an edgy-looking guy with pointy black hair whose left arm lost its flesh at the elbow to turn into a colossal bone-white katana.

"What is she?" Blake asked in disgust as she pointed at a girl that had black cat ears, white swan wings, a fluffy doggie's tail, and arms and legs fully coated in fur, complete with animalistic paws for feet and sharp cat claws at the end of her hands. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"If you can dream it, I can make it!" Echo boasted. "People, Faunus, anything you want! Of course, Faunus are people too. I swear, some of my best friends are Faunus! Like this one I made who these wonderfully soft wings!"

Blaze slammed his hands on the desk, overwhelmed with excitement. "I need the biggest big sister ever, but she thinks she's my little sister and she calls me big brother and she has a super-cute high-pitched voice like Ruby's but higher, even though she's HUGE, super tall, make her seven feet tall but mostly leg, but don't give her thick tree trunk legs, give her thin elegant legs, and give her a butt bigger than my head, and make her wear a french maid outfit like the hot babes wear over in Atlas, with nothing under it but a pair of really long frilly socks and big lacy leather black boots, and, and, give her blonde hair like Yang's only so long it's twice as long as she is, so it trails behind her as she walks, and put bright blue streaks in it, and give her a BIG perky pair of 'Personalities' bigger than my head times two! No, times four! And so she can walk and balance give her a cat tail, a HUGE cat tail with a big spiky ball at the end made of bone, and big swan wings, and adorable white bunny ears, and put extra mouths on the palms of her hands with their own teeth and tongues and give her really good vocal cords so she can shatter glass with her voice, and, and..."

Echo blinked, and made a stunned and wordless confused sound with her mouth.

Every girl except Ruby looked at him in horror.

"And give her milk! Let her make milk, for our cookies!" Ruby yelled, and every girl except Ruby turned to look at her in horror.

"YES!" Blaze screamed. "Give me my big milky super-faunus huge maid long-socks leather-boots spiky-tailed big-winged babe! And give her a smoking hot accent like Weiss's!" Blaze demanded.

Weiss blushed so hard, she came close to passing out. "You think my accent is WHAT?!"

Echo recovered. "I... I don't think that would make a very good combat partner on the battlefield, sorry."

"Battlefield?" Blaze asked.

Everyone was silent for a while.

"Yeah, the... The battlefield." Echo explained. "I make people that'll join your team as unofficial members to help you out and fight during missions. That's why I'm paid to work here, offering my Semblance's services to the warriors here. I can't just go around making people for... Other things. I know some people in the sketchier parts of town have some abilities similar to mine, but I'm not like them. I swore to God I'd never be one of them. I'd never create life for something so rotten. I grant my false lives an honourable live doing good on the battlefield, saving lives. I'm strictly a combat specialist."

Everyone was quiet for a while.

Blake read the book some more, and noticed something. "What does this symbol in the top right mean?" She asked, passing the book back to Echo.

"It means they met an honourable end on the battlefield," Echo smiled. "Or on any kind of mission, really. I like saying The Battlefield because it sounds cooler, and we're all in a grand battle against the forces of evil. We all have our roles to play on the battlefield."

Blake raised an eyebrow. "So you'll create Faunus girls and send them to their deaths, but you won't make that thing Blaze asked for."

Echo flipped her own table, enraged, and she pulled out a flip-knife that was also a gun. "Listen up, pal. If I can save just one real life out there, I'll sacrifice a million phony ones if that's what it takes! I don't care how much it hurts me to make expendable people, knowing that's the only reason I'm still here! There are students at Beacon who only graduated because fatal blows meant for them were taken by my creations! So you can take your self-righteous attitude, and shove it right up your-"

"I want a girl." Blake decided, interrupting her. "A small, harmless-looking sweetheart of a girl with a burning hatred for the White Fang. Give her red hair with black streaks, small black cat ears, a black jacket over a red shirt, and black pants."

"What, do you want me to give her a White Fang mask, bull horns, and a sword that shoots itself out of its sheath like a gun, too?" Echo asked, rolling her eyes and sitting back down. "I don't make mockeries of anyone, not even people I hate more than anything. I don't know if you girls truly realize-"

"And guy," Blaze added.

Echo rolled her eyes again. "I create life, you dunderheads! Real, genuine, thinking, feeling life! And I can't control it once it's out there. How do you think your little girl-Adam or the boy's little fantasy nightmare will act once they take a look in the mirror, live for a few years, and find out exactly why they were created. I don't know if you realize the responsibility I'm putting over your heads by letting you use my services. But listen, I can't just whip a life up out of nothing. I create eggs out of aura, and eventually, when I've filled these eggs with enough aura over a few months, they hatch into people. And only my aura can fill an egg once it's made, so don't go getting any ideas. If the egg goes too long without my aura, it dies. If I want it to hatch, I need a lot of aura. So I need all five of you to decide amongst yourself what you want your little Friend to be, and in a few months, she'll be finished. But first, set my stall up."

Yang effortlessly lifted the stall and flipped it right-side up. And then, she formed a huddle with her team. "I know we want to make someone pretty, but Echo's Friend Area is for the battlefield only. So we should make someone strong, someone who can do something we can't."

"What can't we do?" Weiss wondered. "Ruby and I are fast, Yang is strong, Blake is sneaky, I can freeze our enemies, and Blaze carries enough weaponry to make an Atlesian artilleryman feel inadequate. The only thing he's missing is a giant robot."

"For now." Blaze smiled. "When I get enough money and parts, I'm building one."

Weiss scoffed. "Good luck with that, those things cost more than a mansion!"

"I'd say we lack defensive options," Yang thought. "I know I can absorb attacks by blocking them, but I can't be everywhere at once."

"I can." Blake explained. "My Semblance creates shadowy copies of myself to do things I won't do."

"Like what, swear?" Yang asked.

"No," Blake rolled her eyes. "If I could shoot a foe, or run close to try and flank him, and I activate my Semblance and shoot my foe, my Semblance creates a copy to do what I could have done but didn't. My copy runs in to flank my foe while I shoot."

"Woah... It's like having your own league of assassins to do whatever attacks you can think of!" Blaze grinned.

"It would be, if I had the aura to make more than a few of them every day. They're also good for blocking attacks I want to dodge. I like using that trick to keep my foes still, it gives me an opening I can use by striking through my clones."

"Promise me you won't do that with this clone, ok?" Blaze asked.

"Never planned to. If these things truly are alive, then it wouldn't be right to sacrifice them." said Blake.

"A plant's alive, but I'll still use a shotgun cartridge full of nature dust to tangle someone in vines." Yang noted. "Come on, Blake, something artificially-made can never really be alive."

"Guys, stop with the existential talk!" Ruby insisted. "We need to figure out what kind of person our new friend will be!"

"She has to be a girl." Blaze decided. "Preferably a hot girl. Let's focus her hotness on the legs, since a huge chest would just get in the way."

"Is it wrong for us to talk about a person like this?" Blake wondered. "We're all sixteen, aside from Ruby, who's..."

"Old enough to hear bad words. I grew up on a farm." said Ruby. "Now focus on making the best girl! Blaze, what weapons can you make for her?"

"I'll make her the best weapons I can for her body type." Blaze decided. "Heavy weapons for the big fighters, and for the small ones, you either compensate with long-reached weapons or exploit their higher speed with fast and agile lightweight weaponry."

Weiss thought deeply. "Blake can counter anything with her clones, Yang can turn any incoming attack into power, Ruby can dodge anything, I fight like a spellcaster, and some day soon, I'll be able to summon."

"You've got a Bloodline Limit?" Blake asked.

"Of course!" Weiss boasted. "See, sometimes, very special people are born. And their Semblance is to give a certain Semblance to their children, on top of whatever Semblances they might normally develop. It's the only way for a person to have more than one Semblance. Atlas experimented with these for a long time, and there was a time when having one would get you put under house arrest with a squadron of women or men of good breeding until you had enough children. But these days, aside from a breeding program that allows Bloodline Limit carriers to apply for all the additional homestays and relationship partners they want, few people care."

"I know what a Bloodline Limit is, Weiss. I was just surprised that you can have the Schnee family's Glyphs, without the Schnee family's Summoning ability." Blake explained.

Blaze broke off from the huddle. "Hey, Echo! Can you give your people Semblances?"

"No. They might develop their own ones based on their personalities, if they live long enough."

Blaze returned to the huddle. "Personality-wise, she needs to be incredibly supportive and kind and protective. The perfect woman, a real sweetheart to the core, who'll lay her life down for us in a second and never let any of us down. But not a weakling who's too soft for the battlefield, she still needs to be able to hate our enemies and kill to protect us. There's no sense in making an argumentative hyper-sensitive pain in the ass or a crybaby who hyperventilates at the sight of blood or an edgelord who'd let us get stabbed and call us weak, right?"

"Makes sense." Yang nodded. "So we all agree, this fake girl needs to be a sweetheart. But what should she look like, and how should she fight?"

It took five hours of contstant conversation before Team RWBBY finally figured out what to request.


	12. Hold me together before I break

By the time the gang had finally decided on what their artificially-crafted teammate should be, it was only because most people involved in the conversation were completely and utterly sick of it. Blaze could argue the same point for hours on end without ever budging, and one would call him ignorant if they were ignorant of his ability to spot holes in the logic of arguments used against his position.

Fortunately, Echo's Friend Area didn't have a limit on how many friends you could make at her establishment. Only a rule that every team that once had a Friend Area echo friend and died would be a lower priority for new orders than a team with an active Friend Area echo friend, who would in turn be a lower priority than a team with no Friend Area echo friends.

So Team RWBBY could have all the artificial friends it wanted, eventually.

For now, the team eventually agreed on something tried, tested, and true.

And that was why their application for an Echo Friend ended up requesting a girl in blue.

With that over and done with, it was time to go and kill someone.

Which was good, because after that much arguing, Weiss was just about ready to kill someone anyway.

The five heroes of Team RWBBY left the school in a rented flying metal four-seater airship known as a Sky Taxi, and Yang drove the vehicle at a comfortable cruising speed on its way into town. Blaze wanted to drive, but Yang also wanted to drive, so Yang drove.

The metallic grey vehicle was built from sharp, blocky polygons, with three thrusters at the back to add speed to the anti-gravity dust engine at the front.

Once Yang felt she'd gotten far away enough from the school, she floored it. The accelerator pedal, that is, not the vehicle itself. Though to her dismay, she found that the stupid vehicle couldn't go past twenty miles an hour without an adult on board.

It took a whole hour of driving before they finally made it to the bad part of town, parked their vehicle a thousand in midair, and watched Yang pocket the keys before leaping off the vehicle without parachutes.

Crimin Alley, that was where they landed. A wretched hive of scum and villainy, with dirty streets full of knife-brandishing hobos and ugly women offering horrible things at low low prices.

Yang landed first in a superhero landing, punching the ground with a mighty explosion. Then Blaze landed with Ruby, the boy cracking the ground with an armoured stomp while the girl pierced it with Crescent Rose, then Blake and Weiss daintily landed on the ground like they'd only jumped a few feet.

Yang reached into her pocket and pulled out their bounty poster. "We're dangerous Huntresses and Huntsmen, and we're here for Crocker Clockpot!" She announced, showing the filthy hobos and diamondless farming implements a poster that depicted a sketch of a wiry man with an unnaturally pointed chin, to the point where many wondered if the artist's hand had slipped while making this.

"New girls..." The hobos chanted. "New girls!"

Only two thugs and five ugly women fled the scene, not wanting any part in this. But the rest approached the five heroes with a demonic look in their eyes.

Yang punched the sky with a shotgun blast from her fist. "Back off, creeps! We're here to kill one criminal today, but I don't mind killing more."

She was laughed at by the criminal scum around her.

"A warning shot?"

"Who's she aiming at? The sky?"

"She's never killed before! I see it in her eyes!"

A hobo grinned right at Yang with blackened teeth and menacingly walked towards her, leering at her while his unwashed friends backed him up. "Pretty girls... Five pretty, pretty little girls..."

"I'm a guy!" Blaze insisted, drawing his blade and creating a thunder-cloaked blade of flame.

"That's fine by me." A hobo to his left giggled, wielding a rebar club with a chunk of cement on the end. "You'll be mine forever, my cute little knight-boy."

"I want the one in yellow. She's the hottest!" A hobo to his right laughed, wielding a baseball bat. "Gonna beat you down and make you quiet and take you home so all my friends can see what I caught for them this week!"

"Faunus in black... I smell your stink from here!" A hobo behind him roared as he brought knives out of his pockets. "I'm gonna show you what you dumb animals are good for!"

"I want the littlest little girl in red! She looks like a cute little puppy... And I love breaking little girls almost as much as I love kicking puppies!" A hobo screamed and laughed like a maniac, revving a chainsaw.

"Weiss Schnee..." A hobo groaned like a zombie. "Rich girl... so clean... so pretty... gonna make you dirty like me... inside and out!"

Blake looked like she was about to be sick.

Weiss looked like she was ready to kill, but no words she could think of could describe anything she currently felt.

Yang and Blake moved to cover Ruby and protect her from this sick filth, but she readied her weapon and cocked a shot ready in her Crescent Rose's chamber because she didn't need protecting.

The hobos licked their lips menacingly and seemed to multiply by the second as hobos from elsewhere in the bars and other criminal streets were summoned by words said by those who fled.

A hobo from behind grabbed Yang's legs and pulled her to the ground while his filthy friends rushed towards her in a horde of evil.

Blake sent out one of her combination knife-guns on razor-sharp black ribbons, wrapping around three men. She yanked it to pull the ribbon taut and tie them together, before firing at the heads of all three with her other gun.

Ruby slashed through one hobo, spun her weapon above her own head while turning into rose petals and flying through a crowd of them, slashing them all apart with rosy red cuts from her petals, and posed like a badass as her synchronized foes went down.

Weiss pierced one thug through the eye with her rapier, then pierced the other eye and throat and heart and left lung and right lung and stomach and liver and spleen and kidneys and bladder and everywhere else she could remember existed on a human body in that high-adrenaline moment before turning to another and swinging a blade of ice at him, a blade of ice that travelled through three more hobos before striking a side alleyway's ground to make a wall of ice, blocking that path from which more hobos were approaching, forcing them to run around the buildings and approach from another alley.

Blaze diagonally stabbed a hobo in the chest with his his blade of fire and electricity, stabbing through him and into the ground, which sent golden columns of fire along the ground in the direction of a hobo swarm, burning electricity arcing between them to burn them all. As they exploded, he swung his blade up through the hobo's head to free it from the ground.

With the sound of a shotgun blast, Yang punched one Hobo in the chest so hard that he was smashed into pieces, and each piece flew into another hobo, striking hard enough to turn their flimsy filthy bodies to crushed mush.

And as the five heroes became drenched with blood that painted the streets and stained their shoes, the five realized something in growing horror.

These monsters didn't have aura.

All five of them were murderers now.

_Killers._

Tears welled up in Ruby's eyes and she started to make noises that sounded like a miserable puppy. "Yang!" She cried, going to pieces like a terrified child and forgetting the weapon in her hands. "I don't want to be a killer any more!"

Blaze stared at his own murderous and lethal blade in horrified fascination as his dust weapon's heated blade singed and boiled and burned away the blood that coated it. He stared and stared at his weapon in mounting horror, even as more monstrous hobo scum approached him with leers in their eyes and self-preservation far from their minds.

Too disgusted for words, Weiss bent over to hurl a neverending stream of thick creamy chunk-filled vomit into a pool of blood.

Yang lost her mind in a flood of rage at the state these filthy freaks had put her teammates in, screaming and throwing out a lethal rush of fireball-tossing punches at anyone she saw who wasn't on her team. Approaching monsters, spectators, she didn't care any more, and she didn't care how this ate away at her ammo, she hated herself and her sinful hands and the blood on her shoes and the cries of horror from Ruby. She Ignited, her Semblance cranking her power higher than ever before as her damage-centered Semblance tried to avenge her new emotional damage.

Ruby cried and grabbed her sister from behind and blubberingly begged her to stop, but Yang wasn't listening.

Only Blake, who'd killed before, was able to keep her cool. "Just pretend they're Grimm!" She ordered, "And remember that if you don't get them now, they'll get innocent little girls when you aren't around!"

Her friends didn't react to what she said.

Blake ran up the side of a bar to get onto the rooftops, where she combined her two guns into a machine gun and began mowing down approaching hobos from above with trained accuracy for shots to the head and chest. Her Semblance conjured two shadowy copies of herself to aid her in this quest, ordering them to fire at the foes she wasn't firing at, but avoid shooting spectators like Yang was doing. She made sure to personally get the hobos that had started off approaching with their friends, but turned tail and fled the second they started getting killed. The one who called her a Faunus, she made sure to shoot in the legs and back, leaving him to bleed out as she shot his friends around him in the head and chest.

When there were no bodies left to kill...

When there were no bodies left, and four were left in a pool of blood as Blake leapt back down to return to her team, Weiss began to cry.

Yang roared with fury and crouched down and punched the ground, struck the very world she lived on, her semblance avenging all the damage she'd ever sustained in her life to create a small earthquake and a shockwave that cleansed the ground around them of blood and smashed the windows of buildings around them, yet did little more than that.

She remained crouching, crying onto the ground beneath her. Ruby hugged her tight and cried upon her.

Weiss didn't know what to do. Blaze didn't know what to do. Yang didn't know what to do. Ruby didn't know what to do.

Blake knew what to do.

First, she pressed a button on Blaze's sword to turn it off, the dust blade melting back into the hilt.

With his glowing distraction from what he'd done removed, he was left alone without an anchor in reality.

He stared at her with big, empty eyes that seemed a thousand miles away.

He turned his weapon on himself, put the hilt to his own chin and prepared to form its blade once more, but she snatched it away in time and threw the lifeless weapon to the ground.

She hugged him, but if he noticed anything, he didn't show it.

Not until he started to cry into her shoulder and held her tight enough for it to hurt. But Blake didn't give up, or give in to the pain. She reached over to gently grab Weiss and Ruby's arms, tugging them closer before offering a group hug centered around Yang.

Weiss cried, Ruby cried, Yang cried, Blaze cried...

Blake found herself crying anyway, reminded of the first time she killed.

The five heroes cried in each other's arms, leaning on each other for support.

Weiss didn't protest or pretend she had some distant reputation to maintain.

Yang didn't crack any jokes.

Ruby couldn't say anything to try and lighten the mood.

Blaze couldn't even think.

Blake wrapped her arms around her team and held them tight. "It's okay," She whispered to them, "We did the right thing. It hurts at first, but the more you remind yourself that you did the right thing, the less it hurts. It's okay... It gets easier."

The team held itself together and continued to cry.

They were all they really had in this world.

And it would only get worse from here.


	13. The War

"I wanna go home." Ruby whimpered to her teammates, her hands still bloody.

"Not yet." Blake said, cocking her gun. "We can't go home until the job is done. We have to kill Crocker Crockpot."

Blaze grimly got his sword out and ignited a blade of stunning lightning, his Ante Up arm blasting a shot of fire into his weapon to coat it in flames. "I'll kill him."

Blake patted Blaze on the head like he was a dog. "That's the spirit!" She smiled. "If we all work together, we can get through this."

Her smile healed something within him, just a little.

"If we get out of this alive..." Blaze said.

"WHEN we get out of this." Blake corrected him, and closed her eyes. Then six copies of herself formed to go door to door, kicking doors open and breaching rooms, holding their guns on innocents and criminals alike before moving on, searching for their prey.

"There's something I need to tell you. But not now." Blaze told her.

Blake's eyes snapped open. "I've found him! He's in the Spread Eagle, a gay Faunus bar!"

"What? Why would he be there?" Yang wondered.

"Because he hates Faunus and gay people, so nobody would ever think to look for him there. Also he's looking for his next victim."

"What's his crime, again?" Weiss asked.

"He killed six gay Faunus girls over the course of four years. His latest victim escaped by faking her death using her Semblance. She posted the bounty." Blake explained.

"He killed gay Faunus girls?" Yang repeated for the audience's benefit. You should hate Crocker Crockpot.

"Now we have to kill him, or nonlethally capture him and take him to the prison halfway across this stupid city where he can be hanged in public, since hanging is one of the few ways to reliably kill someone with aura. Trying to behead someone with aura would take too many guillotine swings."

"So we're killing him?" Yang asked.

"Hell yeah." Blake nodded.

"Good." Yang punched her fists together, ready to kill.

With their location set, they ran through grimy and dirty alleys full of dead people until they eventually found a cowboy-themed gay bar with blacked-out windows and a shocking logo on the top of the building. It had a big eagle tied up on a table with a ball in his mouth, and a few nice roosters were standing around him.

Yang grinned. "Wow... That spread eagle is surrounded by some really nice c-"

Blaze covered Ruby's ears. "Please don't." He said.

"Maybe you should stay out here." Weiss offered.

"Hey, I can help too!" Ruby insisted.

Yang looked uncomfortable "We know, but... We're old enough to see what goes on in there. You aren't."

"Ruby, jump up to high ground and watch the building!" Blaze commanded. "If our target tries to escape through the front door, back door, or a roof or window, take him out! Blake, sneak in behind us and act natural while trying to get a chance to shoot him in the head. We want our target to think it's just me and my sister and her gay girlfriend here."

"Wait, are Yang and I playing the part of a gay couple?" Weiss gasped. "I could never... My father would kill me!"

With just one finger, Yang tilted Weiss's chin up so she looked deep into Yang's eyes. "Doesn't that make it so much more exciting?"

Weiss blushed immensely, her whole face turning red and steamy.

"That's the spirit!" Blaze smiled. "He thought he was coming here to kill someone, but the only one getting their brains blown out tonight is him!"

The party of four brightly coloured teenagers discreetly and awkwardly walked into the gay bar with weapons drawn, and as they walked, dancers on tables and people dressed like construction workers stopped and stared at the newcomers.

The funky gay jazz music stopped, and even the female dancers dressed like cats and the girls who watched them stopped and looked at the newcomers.

But with all the comotion they awkwardly caused, they intentionally created a diversion to let Blake sneak in and leap to a gay chandelier with caged dancers in it, landing so lightly that she didn't disturb them. Blake took the high ground, and got her machine gun ready.

"I'm gay." Blaze said awkwardly to the crowd. "And so is my sister."

"Yep! I'm gay too." Weiss said unconvincingly.

Everyone was silent for a while.

Blaze whispered to Yang. "Yang! Do something gay!"

Yang picked Weiss up like she was a weightless ragdoll and kissed her on the lips, as though she were a starving man and her lips were delicious meat.

The gay men cheered on this display of gayness, and the one phony in the crowd looked away in disgust. The gay music started again and a singer started singing about how he was never going to give you up, let you go, run around, or desert you.

The disgusted man was an extremely wiry man with a long and pointy chin they realized, horrifyingly, was real all along. Crocker Crockpot, a wanted man wanted for killing gay faunus girls. He turned around to his table and resumed chatting up a girl. "You know, I'm sure my gay sister your age would love you."

"Everyone does." The woman smiled, and she caught Yang's eye by being exceptionally beautiful. She had long white hair down to her knees, a body with proportions that rivalled Yang and surpassed them in top-heaviness. It was hard to focus on anything other than how impossibly stacked this girl Yang's age was. She was even whiter than Weiss, so she had to be from Atlas. She wore clothing that started life as an elegant white dress with puffy sleeves and no back, but everything below the hips had been raggedly torn off. White bike shorts kept her decent, and she wore white bunny slippers of all things. A portable electric keyboard and a double-necked electric guitar were both on her back, crossing each other like a pair of swords.

"No way... Is that Ash Albion?" Weiss gasped like a fangirl.

Blaze and Yang looked at her like she was crazy.

Weiss pretended she didn't care and was cooler than this. "She's a famous singer from back home. I wonder what she's doing here..."

There was a gunshot, and its bullet went right through Crocker Crockpot's head. And another one, and another one. From her perch up high, Blake emptied her clipazine into the monster's head before pulling it out and slamming it back in with a twist. Blake resumed firing and Crocker got up, activating a watch that formed a shield of light in his right hand and a spear in his left. He blocked her shots, but when Blaze gave his massive sword a mighty swing down on his enemy, Crocker was forced to block it and take some bullets to the knee. Weiss waved her wand-sword and encased his feet in ice, and Yang punched him in the face hard enough to send him flying across the room.

"This man killed six Faunus girls! We're Team RWBBY, and we're here to stop evil!" Blaze announced.

The gay music started again as everyone cheered the heroes on.

The singer started singing about how he liked you because you've got that something that he needs in his life, so give it to him.

Crocker throw his spear through Weiss's chest, but she cartwheeled to the side to dodge it. She sent icicles flying at him, and he blocked them with his shield before taking cover behind the bar.

Blake opened fire with a barrage of Fire Dust shots, shattering apart the bottles behind the bar as the monster dodged each bullet.

"You missed!" Crocker boasted.

There was the sound of a gunshot as Blaze fired another gunshot's worth of Lightning Dust into his sword, armouring it some more. "Did she?" He smirked, touching his blade to the puddles of alcohol that linked with the alcohol soaking his clothes.

There was a mighty explosion of flame, and Crocker Crockpot screamed as he was set on fire. He stopped, dropped, and rolled into a puddle of more alcohol and couldn't get flame-free until he rolled out of it.

While he was on the ground, Yang stomped on his head and kept stamping. She wished she had guns on her shoes so she could stomp harder, but she settled for punching bullets into him while she stamped.

Crocker grabbed her leg and twisted it out of position, and Yang screamed as this brought her to the ground. Yang reset her leg properly with a loud crack and hopped to her feet, only to get stabbed in the chest by his light lance. He lifted his leg and kicked her in the lance, sending it further through her body and towards Weiss. She bent an ice barrier to deflect it, turn the lance around, and send it back at Crocker, but he blocked it with his shield.

Blake opened fire and forced him to block with his shield again, giving Blaze the chance to slam his own shield Mordread into Crocker while releasing a burst of Magnet Dust. Crocker flew back into the gay bar's kitchen, where a lot of knives levitated up and began to fly at him, but he reshaped his light shield into a big dome and closed his eyes and covered himself with it until the magnetism ran out.

When he opened his eyes, he saw Yang jumping towards him with fist pulled back, ready to strike. She slammed her fist down, but he wasn't there, he was behind her. He stabbed another lance into her, this time thrusting into her knee to keep her still while she pulled at the light weapon and tried to break it so she could walk again.

"I'm done playing with my prey." Crocker said, cracking his knuckles and cracking his neck as he menacingly walked towards Blaze.

Blaze readied his Double Down gun arm and prepared to fire an ice blast to freeze the guy, and he screamed in pain as his punch blasted an ice blast at his foe. It detonated hard enough to make a frozen blast of countless sharp spikes, but Blaze's arm was thrusted back from the recoil, snapped back at a horrible angle. Grimacing, he grabbed his broken arm with his good arm and snapped it back into place so his aura could heal him.

"You call that an ice attack?" Ash asked, getting out her electric guitar and setting its knob to the ice setting before giving it a power chord.

With one massive blast of icy sonic energy, the whole bar was transformed into a wintery wonderland.

Everyone was blasted back against walls and smashed tables, and everyone's breath became visible in the air, yet his target was not visible.

His target, Crocker, walked into the snowy building with an unconscious Ruby held by the neck of her cloak.

"Ruby!" Blaze cried.

Crocker threw the girl face-first into the snow and got ready to stab her in the back of the head with his light spear, but Blake shot it out of his hand before emptying another magazine at him.

But he wasn't there, he was behind the girl, and countless light spears stuck out of her back like she'd gone from a Cat girl to a Hedgehog.

She fell to the ground, unconscious and running out of aura. It was all Blaze could do to rush over and pull the weapons out with his one good arm before she ran out completely.

"We're getting killed out here!" Blaze realized, fear gripping his heart.

"I'll kill your family, and then I'll kill you." Crocker grinned at the little boy. "If you think you can stop me, then come closer and fight me.

Blaze took a step forward, and another step-

And found that he'd gotten further away from his foe!

"What's the matter?" Crocker asked smugly. "You aren't running away, are you?"

"Hell no!" Blaze yelled, breaking into a sprint with his sword raised high. He prepared to swing down on the smug monster, but-

He ended up right back where he started, as though nothing had happened.

"Your eyes are telling me no, you don't want me to kill you." Crocker grinned. "But your body... Your cowardly little body's telling me yes."

Yang burst into the room and pulled her arm back to slam a punch into him, but Crocker used his Semblance once again. The world slowed down to a crawl and stopped, and he was just fine as he smugly walked around Yang before gently moving her so that her flying punch was aimed right at Blake.

He deactivated his Semblance, time resumed flowing, and Yang unintentionally punched Blake's lights out while slamming her into Blaze and knocking them both down.

Ruby was unconscious, Blake was unconscious and out of aura and bleeding, Yang started freaking out and whispering no while looking at her sinful, murderous hands, and Blaze...

Blaze wet himself in fear and cried like a little baby, hugging his big sister.

"I want to go home!" He cried.

And that was it.


	14. The Way

Blake awoke with a pounding headache and something cold at his lips, a liquid. He opened his eyes and pushed the cup of water away, but when he tried to get up, he failed and screamed in pain, lying back down.

He felt so drained, and in so much pain... Was he out of aura?

He tilted his head to one side, and saw a hospital bed with a sleeping Ruby next to him.

He screamed.

Ruby got up and screamed, too.

He heard Glynda's voice. "Oh, do shut up."

"Glynda?" Blaze asked. "What happened?"

"Your mission was a complete failure." Glynda explained. "Your teammates are recovering from their injuries. You foolish dunces went up against one of the strongest outlaws available, and expected to win just because you carry heavy weaponry, Weiss is a Schnee, Blake knows how to hide, Ruby thinks she's invincible, and Yang can take a beating."

"Oh. Well when you say it like that..." Blaze smiled.

Glynda glared at him. "Your sisters could have died in your arms."

Blaze looked down in shame.

"You kids forget this often, but there are adults in this world. Adults who have trained their whole lives, and have more aura than you. Some of them have so much aura, they can simply outlast you and your attacks. Did you even read your bounty mission page in its entirety? Crocker Crockpot's Semblance, 'Me Time', lets him slow down time for himself and others as much as he wants. That serial killer uses it to make the agony of his dying victims last for months before death finally claims them. And he uses it to evade and redirect attacks from threats! You can't hit him once he starts taking you seriously! You can't rely on weaponry strong enough to destroy buildings when you're fighting people harder to destroy than mountains!"

Blaze started to cry.

"Are you seriously crying?" Glynda asked. "Are you sure you're cut out for a life on the battlefield? Because it seems to me you're too weak to save anyone."

"I'm not weak!" Blaze blubbered like a weakling, tears and snot streaming down his face. "I'll get stronger, strong enough to save everyone!"

Glynda walked away in disgust. "One week. No missions for a week! Only lessons, and training sessions. And if you are EVER late for a lesson, you WILL be sorry!"

She stormed out and slammed the door behind her.

Blaze struggled to hold back tears. He couldn't save anyone... He let everyone down... He was going to fail this family just like he failed to save his old one...

"It's okay, little bro. Let it all out." Ruby said to him.

Blaze flopped back on the bed and cried. Quietly, to not disturb his beloved sister, but he still cried.

"Don't feel bad, little guy." A nice old lady with curled balls of grey hair said to him, giving him a glass of chocolate milk. He stopped crying, wiped his face, and drank up. "She just hates it when her underprepared students die on the battlefield."

"I..." Blaze sobbed.

"There's no shame in losing or pulling out when things get bad." The old lady smiled. "You were right to flee and save your girls. Especially when so many of them were out of aura and bleeding."

"I didn't run away!" Blaze shouted in the old lady's face, because he wasn't always perfect. He had personality problems and flaws.

"Then perhaps, what teleported you and your girls home to your dorm room was your Semblance?" She smiled.

"My semblance?" Blaze asked, looking at his hands. "My semblance... helps me run away like a little sissy baby?"

The old lady shook her head.

"Your semblance saves lives by letting you get the wounded off the battlefield. It's a power I wish I had, to be frank. A lot of my old friends would still be here, if I had that. Maybe I wouldn't be so alone in the world."

Blaze reached over and hugged her, to his surprise. "Thank you for healing my friends."

"Any time, dear! I must say, it's nice to be appreciated by the boys for once. So many men think a life in the hospital is beneath them. So they go to the battlefield, and end up in the hospital anyway! And when I save their lives, it's so they can kill more lives. Such a strange world we live in." She cackled like an old crone.

"I think society's really messed up." Blaze said. "So many Huntsmen and Huntresses are focused on their next paycheck and their next big mission, when everyone should be out killing the Grimm until every last one of them is dead!"

"Oh, you hate the Grimm?" She wondered.

"Hell yeah! I want to kill every last one of them! They killed my birth parents!" Blaze yelled. "I don't remember who they are, but... I miss them. I don't know anything about them, and I can't even imagine a life where they're still around because I don't know anything about them. Isn't that messed up?" He let go of her.

"It is. You should get your crying done now. My granddaughter's going to heal you next, and she's quite the cutie! I'm sure she'd love a darling little knight like you."

"I'm not cute." Blaze growled cutely, folding his arms..

"You're adorable!" Ruby laughed.

Meanwhile, Weiss and Blake trained harder than ever before while Yang worked on her motorcycle.

Blaze, however, was sure that even though the hospital had a TV for the patients to watch, a day spent in the hospital would be super boring.

Until the old lady went away and her granddaughter came into the room.

She had a body like Yang's, except she was packing even more heat than Yang. Her long pink hair was in two ponytails, and it had been pushed back so it wouldn't hide the short white cow horns on her forehead. A shiny gold shirt and blue overalls struggled to contain her F-cup monsters that, Ruby assumed, just had to be fake. She wore a gold skirt to let her snakelike white tail on her butt with pink hair on the end swish around freely. She didn't carry a weapon, and her boots were white.

With such beauty, Blaze expected her to be cold and cruel. A lot of hot women he met over the years were like that because their beauty allowed them to get away with it. But instead, this was a kind soul who talked to the patients and seemed genuinely interested in what they had to say.

She also seemed REALLY interested in what Blaze had to say. They spoke for a while about nothing at all and Blaze felt calm, and at peace with the world. Her voice was soft and high and faint, but cheerful. This woman's calming aura seemed to make all the problems in the world fade away. Ruby, on the other hand, felt an odd jealousy she'd never felt before. Normally, he was only that calm and peaceful when he was sleeping in her arms after a long day.

They'd been talking for a while now, but...

"What's your name?" Blaze finally remembered to ask.

"I'm Milky Way." She smiled. Her name appeared on the screen and her subtitles said **_Milky Way: The Golden Calf. Semblance: Bovine's Bounty._**

"Cool name!" Blaze smiled. "I'm Blaze Rose, and this is Ruby Rose."

"That's nice! So tell me more about _you_!" She ignored Ruby and leaned in closer to him and he couldn't believe his luck. Blaze had no idea what to say so he talked about his weapons for half an hour and got way too excited. Normally, this would disgust women. But she seemed fine with it.

"It's not that I don't like your company, because I do, but... Do you have anyone else to heal?" Ruby asked.

"Nope! Thanks to aura, it's rare that we ever have to heal anyone." The cowgirl explained. "You're a Huntsman, right?" She asked Blaze eagerly, leaning to the side a little. Her mammoth mammaries leaned to the side a little, too. "What's your Semblance?"

He was too stunned at her beauty to speak.

"I can turn into fast rose petals, and my brother can teleport us home when things go bad." Ruby said. "He might be able to do other stuff but we haven't tested it yet. What can you do?"

"It's super cool, you'll love it!" Milky Way grabbed an empty glass and left the room. When she returned a second later, it was full of a brown liquid, which she passed to Blaze. "Drink up?"

"No fair! I want chocolate milk too!" Ruby insisted.

Blaze sipped his cup, and his eyes went wide. "This is... the greatest chocolate milk I've ever tasted!"

She snapped her fingers, and the liquid in his cup turned pink.

He sipped it again, and his jaw dropped. "Strawberry milk?"

"You're a magician... of milk?" Ruby gasped.

"That's right!" She boasted.

Blaze drank his whole cup, and passed it back to the medic cow girl.

She took it, left the room, and returned with a glass of chocolate milk for Ruby.

Ruby grabbed the drink and greedily gulped it down with a big grin. "It's delicious!"

The two began to feel funny. Their pain went away, and their exhaustion faded.

"I feel better now? What's going on?" Ruby asked.

"Did you heal us with milk?" Blaze asked.

"That's right!" Milky grinned. "My Semblance is called Bovine's Bounty. It lets me make milk that heals people, and move and change it however I want!"

Ruby's jaw dropped and the colour faded from his face. A big grin formed on Blaze's face. The two spoke in unison. "Did you just say you... make the milk? Yourself?"

"Oh wow that's super creepy." Milky smiled nervously at Blaze's face, making him come close to tears almost instantly. "But yep!" Milky smiled, putting her index finger over the glass and squirting from its tip a pink stream of strawberry milk.

"Oh, thank God." Ruby groaned.

"Aw." Blaze said in disappointment.

"Huh?" Milky tilted her head in confusion.

"Nevermind." Blaze smiled nervously. And when he was nervous, he thought about weapons to calm himself down. "What weapon do you use on the battlefield?" He asked.

"Who needs weapons when you can flood buildings?" She smiled.

"No way..." Ruby gasped. "Your semblance is building-level? Mine's only Personal!"

"Mine's Multi-Personal!" Blaze bragged.

"Most Semblances are at the personal level, at first... It's why I exclusively trained it, while abandoning all weapons. I fight like the Magicians of old. Or like those people who put Dust in their clothes to get elemental attacks, I guess. Always wondered why more Huntsmen and Huntresses don't do that. I've got Lightning Dust in my gold clothes so I can shock people if I want."

"That's cool! I guess I finally beat my sister at something..." Blaze smiled. "My Semblance saved everyone at that Faunus bar! I'm not sure how, but I'll master this Semblance some day. By the way, speaking of Faunus... Why do you have horns and a tail?"

"Because I'm a Faunus." Milky tilted her head in confusion. "And I'm proud of that. Not a lot of Faunuses go into medicine. But I was born for it!"

"But our Faunus teammate only has cat ears." Ruby pointed out.

"You noticed she's a Faunus too?" Blaze wondered.

"Everyone noticed!" Milky smiled. "Blake's the black-haired girl who loves fish, right? She might think she's fooling people by hiding her ears with that bow and stuffing her cat tail down her pants legs, but everyone noticed. We're all just too polite to say anything about it until the day she's ready to come out of the closet and take her dumb ribbon off."

"I think the ribbon's cute." Blaze admitted. "But her real ears are probably cuter!"

"Hey, only we can call other Faunuses cute!" Milky insisted. "That's _our_ word."

"That's not your word, that's our language!" Blaze insisted right back, not backing down. "How can we come together and come to appreciate what makes us different in the same way we appreciate what brings us together if we hide things from each other?"

She was impressed by his reasoning. "You're wiser than you look."

"Yeah!" He grinned, without a hint of shame. "Some people are overcomplicated, but I'm a simple guy with simple wisdom."

"I can appreciate that. But how do you guys not know Faunuses have two animal traits? Is Blake the only Faunus you guys have ever met here, or something?" Milky wondered, folding her arms.

"Yes." They admitted in unison, to her surprise.

"We're from the countryside." Blaze admitted.

"The only other Faunuses we've ever met was a dust shopkeeper back home, an old fox guy who had two ears. He was probably just missing his tail come to think of it since he had a ton of scars too." Ruby said.

"I liked him. He gave me a job fixing his old weapons and paid me in Dust! Hey, you're probably really bored during shifts down here if there's nobody to heal, right?" Blaze asked.

"Super bored!" She smiled. "There's nothing to do but watch daytime movies all day!"

She turned on the TV to demonstrate what garbage was on the TV these days.

_"Oh, Janice..." A man held his woman close. "You'll always be the love of my life!"_

_"Oh, Lance..." A woman pulled away, but couldn't get away. "I can't! It's not right! You're my Cousin's Uncle's Son's-"_

"I think I'm going to be sick!" Ruby complained.

"I feel like I lost a little part of my humanity today." Blaze whispered.

Milky turned the TV off. "I'd throw up, but that'd just mean more milk. My Semblance is strong and I have trouble controlling it when I feel strong emotions. So when I feel strong feelings, literally everything that comes out of me is milk. Or cheese, which comes straight out of my-"

"Enough about your body!" Ruby yelled, disgusted.

"Do you have enough people down here?" Blaze checked before he said what he wanted to say.

"Always! On Tuesdays like these I'm the only one here during the night shift. But every other time of the day, my grandmother is on duty. Or two or three other people at the same time instead of her, with their own weaker Healing semblances. She and I are the ones with the best Healing semblances, so they only need us on our own to heal. I wish I could do more to help people, but I'm stuck here until I find a team willing to take me on as their field medic. I asked my grandmother to give me some of her shifts, thinking she'd enjoy the free time at home... But she hates it! She doesn't have anything to do all day except watch the same sucky TV shows as me."

"That's perfect! Not the grandmother watching TV part, the other thing. How'd you like to join us?" Blaze asked.

"You mean it?" She gasped.

"You seem nice and your Semblance could save the lives of us and every innocent person we run into! Hiring you is a no-brainer!" He decided. "Right, team leader?"

"Okay, but she can't be an official member!" Ruby protested. "It'll mess up our team name! Where can you put a M in RWBBY? MRWBBY? RWBBYM? RWMBBY?"

"Maybe she can join once we get someone on our team whose name starts with an L, so we can be Team RWMBBLY?"

"No, that name's dumb!" Ruby insisted.

"There's a W in your team name already, right?" Milky asked. "My name is Milky _Way_, so you could add a second W in there."

"Team RWWBBY..." Ruby repeated to herself, testing the name out.

"I think it's kind of dumb to add one letter to a team's name if it won't change anything." Blaze said, lampshading his team name in a manner so hilarious it made TvTropes love him. "But I'd love to have you abreast- I mean aboard!"

"Yes! She fist-pumped happily, and bounced. And bounced, and bounced... "My days of boredom are over! Look out, battlefield! I'm going to heal all the heroes, and nobody will EVER die again!"

She hugged him tight, pressing him deeply into her pair of cows.

"I'm sorry, Yang..." Blaze thought silently with a big grin on his face. "But I think I'll dream about someone else tonight."

Then Milky ran over to Ruby and hugged her too.

"Can't... breathe!" She complained.

Blaze laughed at her.

Some day, they would be healed. And training would begin.

They wouldn't stop training until they were strong, stronger than ever before!

But it was nice to stop and enjoy life, too.


	15. Healing and Revelations: Faunus Weiss

Once Ruby and Blaze had fully healed, with the help of their new teammate, they made sure to bring her home and introduce her to her team.

Blaze slammed the door open, grabbing the interest of Weiss, who was reading; Yang, who was doing pushups; and Blake, who was reading.

"Introducing our newest team member... Milky Way!" Ruby declared.

"This little number comes with power steering, full auto, and enough milk to flood a swimming pool!" Blake declared.

Blushing, Milky Way demonstrated her abilities by pointing finger-guns in the air and firing out two small streams of strawberry and chocolate milk, which swirled together into a ball she snapped up with her mouth. "That's me, Milky Way! I'm a medic and my Semblance is called Bovine's Bounty. Anyone who drinks my milk is healed and supercharged. You should have seen how Blaze and Ruby bounced off the walls once they had too much! I can also electrocute my milk with the Lightning dust dress or boil or freeze my milk with my Fire glove or Ice glove. Anyway, I want to be a great medic and save lives like my dead mother used to!"

Weiss raised an eyebrow at Ruby. "Don't you think you should have asked all of us before you added someone new to the team?"

"This room is getting pretty crowded. We might have to expand it again." Blake said.

"I promise I won't get in your way!" Way insisted. "I'm just a medic attached to your team. If you'd like, I can sleep in a different room and stay out of fights and heal you after fights."

"No way!" Ruby insisted. "You're a New Member for now but if you're ever going to become an official part of our team, you need to make friends with everyone! We're all friends here!"

"I'm not friends with any of you!" Weiss lied, blushing a lot. "I hate all of you dolts!"

Blaze backflipped over to her and grabbed her in a crushing bear hug. "I love you too, sweetie."

"Noooo! Get off me!" She struggled cutely. "You're ruining my badass image!"

Yang lost it completely, laughing until she collapsed to the ground.

"You guys have... An interesting team dynamic." Milky Way smiled.

Blake put her book down and walked up to her, getting in her personal space. "So, you make milk?" She asked.

Way nodded. "I can make cheese, too."

That caught Weiss's attention. "I'm quite the cheese connoisseur. Nothing pairs with Atlesian wine quite like one of the five million different kinds of Atlesian cheese."

"And I'm a milk connoisseur. Show me what you've got!" Blake challenged her.

"Everyone, get together and see what I can do when boosted by Dust!" Milky announced. "Take me to your kitchen!"

Everyone got together in Team RWWBBY's kitchen room, which was like they'd stepped through a portal into the fanciest five-star restaurant of all time. They all gathered around a big white oaken table with a fine silk white table cloth, while Milky Way ran through a door and into the attached Actual Kitchen. It was a professional-quality kitchen with pizza ovens and regular ovens and multiple stoves and everything a real restaurant could ever need! All of this school's kitchens were like this, to encourage teams to work together at different parts of the Kitchen to create their team's meals. Of course, there were no rules against hiring a maid with your own allowance to cook and clean for you. And Milky was one hell of a chef.

"Time to show them what I can do when I get serious!" Milky took a grey Neutral Dust crystal out of her pocket, about the size of an apple, and bit off a tiny pea-sized chunk of it before putting it back in her pocket.

Milky threw wide white dinner plates and long Champagne Glasses through the air and towards the team's table, each one landed exactly where it had to go.

Milky raised her hands. In one palm, she made a massive ball of pure white milk. And in her other hand, she generated milk that turned into every type of cheese she'd ever heard of and tried, offering some to Weiss, some to Ruby, some to Yang, some to Blake, and some to Blaze. Then she gave everyone but Ruby a Champagne Glass and filled it with milk from her hand, giving Ruby a Champagne Glass with some chocolate milk because she's epic.

Blake sipped her milk first, and...

Blake's eyes began to tear up. "This milk... It's not just cow milk, it's cat milk! And it's not just cat's milk, it's like something an old Desert Queen from Vacuo would bathe in! It's so soothing, like the water you'd drink after wandering in the desert for three days!"

Everyone stared at her in shock. They had never seen this reserved shadow princess emote so much before!

"This is..." Blake's eyes watered even more. "I'm sorry, does anyone have a handkerchief?"

Yang reached into her pocket, pulled out a spare pair of white underwear, and gave it to the catgirl. "Will this do?"

Weiss looked at her in confusion. "Why do you carry those?"

Yang raised an eyebrow. "You mean you don't? What if you need a spare pair?"

Blake's eyes overflowed with tears that fell so thickly, everyone at the table could hear the liquid streams landing on the oaken dining table. She dabbed them with her handkerchief to absorb the tears and soak the fabric, but as soon as they left one eye, the other resumed overflowing, and overflowing more with each second.

"Blake? Is something wrong?" Ruby asked. "Are you okay?"

"What did your milk do to Blake?" Yang yelled, grabbing Milky Way by the chest and getting ready to punch her face. Milky Way, for her part, only smiled and showed her empty palms to the girl.

Blake screamed and sobbed openly as her eyes began gushing out constant streams of tears. "What the hell's with these tears? I can't stop crying!"

Ruby screamed, pointing at Blake's eyes. "Blake, your eyes! The white parts, they're... They're all shrivelled up and squishy!"

Blake fell back out of her chair and screamed as her eyes shot out more liquid, and more, before finally running out.

Everyone else but Milky got up from their seats and crowded around Blake, helping her up. "Blake, are you okay?"

Yang loaded a Life Dust bullet into her right shotgun gauntlet. "It'll hurt like hell, but if you need a shot of life to heal you, just say so."

"I feel..." Blake weakly whispered, and sneezed. Her eyeballs, shrivelled like raisins, shot onto the middle of their table with wet spurts.

Everyone screamed in horror.

And then Blake springed to life and grinned, leaping onto the table and opening her eyes wide to reveal that her eyes looked completely fine, and she stepped on her old eyes without even realizing it, crushing them into the table. "I feel incredible! My eyes haven't felt this good in years! And everything's so detailed!"

Blake got back down from the table and showed off her new eyes. They were just like her old eyes, only instead of the miserable and lifeless eyes of a cold girl, they were bright and full of life.

Blake shoved her head into Yang's face, then ran far away, then ran back to Yang. "I can see you! From up close, and from far away! And my cataracts are completely gone! Everything's... so beautiful!"

Blaze looked really close at Yang's chest. "Has anyone ever told you how big these are? I can see every string of fabric in the cloth of your clothes!"

Blaze and Yang both grabbed Milky Way by the chest and prepared to punch her face. "What the hell did you do to her?" They yelled.

"I healed her." Milky Way smiled. "I've seen insomnia patients act this way after I heal their tired, dry, crusty, disgusting-feeling eyeballs into happy and fresh and perfectly moist eyes. But I had no idea she also had cataracts!"

Blake ran out of the room, and ran back in with a book. She cracked it open, and moved her book around her field of vision. "Holy... My short-sightedness is gone! I can read up close again!"

"When will she be back to normal?" Blaze asked.

"When she stops feeling super-charged with life energy." Milky smiled. "Three, two, one..."

"I'm coming down!" Blake shouted, stumbling to her knees. She panted heavily like she'd ran a marathon. "That was... incredible! I feel so refreshed, like I just slept for a full eight hours, and then napped even more for the entire day! I feel... I feel... I feel fine, I guess."

"Are you alright?" Blaze asked, his voice full of concern.

"I'm fine," Blake shrugged apathetically, back to her old self. "Feeling that good just surprised me. That's all. I haven't felt that good since..."

"Since the accident?" Blaze guessed.

Shock was clear on Blake's face.

"I just guessed, I have no idea what it is!" Blaze insisted. "And you don't have to tell me right now if you don't want to."

"Forget it." Blake coldly sat back down at her table. "I'm fine."

And now that everyone knew Blake really was fine...

"I thought you were going to die!" Ruby cackled.

"That was hilarious!" Blaze giggled.

"I've seen idiots at parties freak out less than you!" Yang chuckled. "You cried even more than Ruby did the first time she saw Old Yeller, and even more than I did the first time I saw Rocky!"

"That was such an uncouth display!" Weiss oh-oh-ho'd, covering her mouth.

Blake blushed heavily. "Whose turn is it to drink?"

"Me! Just like Cardin's mom every night... Bottoms up!" Yang declared, taking a sip of her milk. To everyone's horror, she looked horrified. She clutched her chest in pain, and everyone feared the worst.

And then she got hiccups.

She laughed, and everyone laughed.

Yang laughed even harder, and everyone else kept laughing.

Yang started to cry and choke as she laughed even harder, and everyone else began to nervously force out some laughter.

But Yang's laughter only got more and more intense. She fell out of her seat, laughing uncontrollably as she coughed between laughs, coughing up phlegm and blood as she kept on laughing.

Her legs snapped and cracked and stretched to grow four inches before healing back up, and she felt nothing because she was laughing so hard.

And she kept laughing as something began blocking her throat. She hacked up and coughed up and spat out her own lungs as newer, better lungs grew in their place and forced the old ones out. Once she had finished, she got back up and breathed deeply. "Woah... My lungs feel like I've lived my whole life atop a massive mountain above all the city smog and pollution that's ever existed! It's like I've never gotten a single whiff of motorcycle fumes in my life!"

But nobody could focus on how happy Yang was because everyone was too busy staring at the lungs she had literally coughed up.

"How come your healing is so intense all of a sudden?" Blaze asked Milky Way.

She got out a grey Neutral Dust crystal. "I ate a little shard of neutral dust hoping to show off to you guys. Normally my milk just heals people a little and makes them feel better. But when I'm on Dust, my milk violently heals people."

"Maybe we should stop." Weiss suggested.

"No!" Yang insisted, still hopped up on life energy. "My lungs have never felt better! It's a little uncomfortable at first, but once you get over that first hill, it feels nice!"

"Could this kill us?" Weiss asked.

"No. The worst it can do is hurt a lot as it fixes some organ or bone in your body somewhere." Milky Way admitted. "One time some criminal held my grandmother at gunpoint and demanded my best milk after hearing how it healed his friend. I tried my hardest to overcharge myself on Dust and try to kill him, but my Semblance just can't do that. I ended up overcharging him with life so much that everything felt more intense and seemed like it was in slow motion. So I drowned him with my milk, which I can easily do with or without Dust. The drowning lasted longer for him than it did in real-time. But that's what he gets for pointing a gun at my grandmother!"

Ruby and Blaze looked at each other, and knew what they had to do. They took three gulps of their milk at the same time. They waited one second, two seconds, three seconds, and...

They both screamed.

They both screamed as Ruby's legs and Blaze's legs stretched out and loudly cracked and grinded against themselves, until they were both as tall as Yang was before today, the day Yang grew four extra inches. Ruby's chest and butt filled out until she matched her sister in that department while Blaze's muscles grew until it looked like an arm-wrestling match between him and Cardin would end in a draw and broken table. Blaze's voice dropped a little and he became more of a man where it mattered the least. Ruby's clothes became incredibly and alluringly tight on her, and she needed a new outfit.

"**Tell me!"** Blaze shouted in his all-new manly voice, voiced by Dan Green from Yu-Gi-Oh. **"Ruby Rose, fairest maiden of the moonlit scythe, have you ever felt such elation running through every cell in your body?"**

"Nope!" Ruby kept checking herself out, every inch of her, as she started to vibrate and achieve super-speed. She opened her mouth and said something, but at that speed, nobody could understand her.

"Uh..." Weiss turned to Yang. "Do you understand her?"

Yang shook her head.

"**Her words are a mystery to me." **Blaze confessed. He looked over to Blake and Yang and Weiss and even Milky to see that they really, really liked the sound of his new voice.

"Even my new eyes can't read her lips." Blake admitted. "Speaking of which, I can't wait to start sniping with these."

Ruby grabbed her glass and drank another gulp, and another, and another-"

"Wait, that's too much!" Milky Way screamed.

Ruby vibrated even harder as the glow around her intensified, and she got onto her table as she twitched and twisted, loud cracking noises rippling through her body and distending the skin of her arms.

Her eyes started glowing silver.

"That's new." Milky noticed.

"Get down!" Yang screamed, and everyone got under their table.

Like a thousand machine guns, bone shards shot themselves out of Ruby's body to impale the environment around her, the bones launched by fresh new stronger bones that grew in their place as her skin healed in nanoseconds. One by one, her teeth shot out of her gums like rockets, shoved out by fresh pearly whites that looked better than ever before.

The glow left her, in body and in eyes.

And then she fainted, snoozing and slightly snoring.

"**What incredible power!"** Blaze shouted in his Dan Green voice.** "What sorcery is this, Milky Way?"**

"Yeah!" Yang agreed. "How come Ruby's almost as top-heavy as me now?"

"You and Ruby didn't have any damage for my milk to heal, so it enhanced your bodies." Milky explained.

"Is he going to have that voice forever?" Blake asked.

"I hope so," Blaze said in his old voice. Then he realized his voice was normal again, and Yang laughed at him. "...Damn it!"

"I'm awake!" Ruby shouted, waking up. She got up and checked herself out. "It wasn't a dream? I'm hot now?"

"You're hot now!" Yang hugged her sister in elation. "That means I'm going to have to give you The Talk!"

"But Dad already told me where babies come from!" Ruby protested. "We grew up on a farm! I saw EVERYTHING there!"

"Seriously," Blaze added, "We had seven horses. One of them kept flirting with the wrong species. He'd lay with cows, show off in front of the chicken coop and pig pen, he'd even flirt with sheep."

"Not that talk, the talk about boys!" She smiled.

Blaze thoughtfully rubbed his chin. "Ruby, Blaze, Yang, and Blake. That just leaves Weiss for her dose!"

Weiss didn't look excited. "Do I have to drink it?"

"Hell yeah!" Yang insisted. "Come on, it's a bonding experience for us. Which reminds me..."

Yang smiled at Ruby.

Ruby smiled at Blaze.

Blaze smiled at Yang.

Through their sibling telepathy, they knew what needed to be done.

Yang grabbed Milky's arms, readying electric shells for her shotgun. "Try to escape and you're getting zapped!" She grinned.

Ruby held Milky's mouth open by prying her jaw and upper teeth apart, opening her mouth.

Blaze tipped his milk glass into Milky's mouth.

Milky gulped it down reluctantly, knowing what it would do to her.

They all crowded around her and watched as the glow of life formed around her and her milkbags ballooned outward like exercise balls, and kept on growing. When they'd each gotten bigger than the average four-person car, they flopped down onto their team's table and smashed it apart.

"Aw man..." Milky smiled as the life energy started to overtake her mind. "Gonna take me hours of... hours of milking to get back to... normoo size..."

"Am I having a stroke?" Blaze wondered.

Blushing and completely content like a cow, Milky Way remained in place, mild blank as the life-amplified senses claimed her mind. She began to sweat milk from every pore in her body, and it pooled on the ground around her like she was having an accident. "Moooooooooo!"

Yang turned to Weiss with a grin. "Your turn, Princess."

"What if I turn out like that?" Weiss pointed at their team's cow.

"You won't. Probably." Yang smiled. "I think her milk heals you violently and amplifies you if you don't need healing. So if I drank more I'd get taller and buffer."

"Don't worry, I'm proof that not all its changes are permanent!" Blaze reminded her. "I lost my cool manly voice and got my lame old one back! The one that got me into a choir when I was younger."

"Maybe that's why the change reverted?" Ruby guessed. "With a voice that deep, you probably couldn't keep your old spot on the choir."

"Take on me," Blaze sang to test how high his voice could go. "Take me ooon! I'll beee gooone! In a day or-"

Blake's "Bow" (CAT EARS) twitched as she clamped her hands on his mouth. "Alright, that's high enough."

Blaze licked her hand.

Blake pulled her hands away in disgust and her eyes went far, far away into the distance. "No... Get away from my mother!" She screamed at someone who wasn't there. "Let go of her hands, you freak!"

Yang slapped the back of her head and she snapped out of it.

"Sorry." Blake blushed, turning away.

"Man, your tragic backstory sounds even more interesting than my tragic love life!" Yang smiled, grabbing the cat close and hugging her. "Some day soon, we all need to get in a circle and tell each other everything ever."

"Sounds good to me!" Blaze smiled. "Do you think if Milky Way shoved some Fire Dust into herself, and we drank her milk, we'd turn into fiery creatures?"

"I have no idea. We'll have to check that out later." Yang decided. "Your voice wasn't objectively an improvement like my height and your muscles were, so maybe fiery adaptions would fade away because they'd make living in cold environments harder. Speaking of milk..."

Everyone looked at Weiss expectantly. Except for Milky Way, who Moooood some more.

Weiss fearfully and hesitantly took a sip of her milk, wondering what it would do to her. She tensed up, waiting for some weird stuff to happen, but nothing seemed to happen.

"I suppose I'm too strong for your milk." Weiss downed her whole glass in a few gulps.

Everyone gasped in horror. Except for Milky, who gave another mooo.

Weiss started to laugh. And laugh, and laugh, and laugh as her bones cracked and stretched and she fell to the ground in a twitching heap. Her hair grew longer and broke free of its restraints, stretching out to ten feet and longer, draping over the floor and much of her body.

Laughing, she screamed as something started to bulge out of the top of her hair.

"What the hell?!" She laughed as she started to cry and laugh even harder, as two long and pointy and furry white ears formed atop her head and a long white fox tail grew out from under her skirt.

"You're a Faunus?!" Blake gasped.

"No!" Weiss sobbed and laughed. "No, I can't be a..."

She curled up and gasped for air.

"My mother wasn't a..."

She laughed as her own ears shriveled up and folded themselves inside her head, then emerged from her head once again and fell off.

"My father, he wasn't a Faunus, he..."

She cried and cackled even harder as her animal ears twitched and her tail started to swish all over the place.

"It's a trick, I'm no Faunus, it's just winter adaption, she shoved ice dust right up her-"

She laughed even harder, before getting up and suddenly seeming perfectly fine.

She stood in a body that resembled her elder sister Winter more than ever before, and everyone watched her curiously. Her muscles grew, but not outwards. They didn't bulge like Blake's newfound muscles, they were more like the strong and taut muscles of a dancer or a cat. No longer did she look like a dainty stick figure a mild breeze could knock over. Now, she was a dainty dancer that could only be knocked over by a stronger breeze. And her hair, her untamed seven meters of purest silvery-white hair, and those shockingly white fox ears and that white tail...

Weiss's stomach didn't growl, it roared. And then, a different type of roar ripped out of a different part of her, and a blush overtook her face as her body tensed up.

Yang took a spare pair of underwear out of her pocket and tossed it to Weiss, who grabbed it out of the air gratefully.

Weiss laughed against her own will, angry at herself, as her growing rear made its presence known. Her voice, quiet as a mouse, squeaked out, "My constipation's gone."

She ran off towards the team's bathrooms. It was like the shower room at a sports stadium, built for many people with their own toilet stalls, urinals, and a communal shower. The stalls also lacked doors because all Huntsmen and Huntresses should be fearless at all times.

"Do you think she'll be okay?" Ruby asked in concern.

"Maybe I should check on her." Blaze started to follow her, but Blake grabbed his arm and when he stopped to look at her, she shook her head.

"Blaze, she'll come back when she's ready to tell us what she is." Blake said.

Yang grinned. "Maybe she's going to take care of that stick up her-"

The gaseous sound Weiss released from far away cut everyone off...

And made everyone but Blake laugh.


	16. Weiss's mom cheated on dad with The Pope

Adjusting to their newfound bodies would take a while.

After that first night, Blaze found that she had gained six inches of height, too. The girls (And Blaze) kept bumping their legs on tables and in the early hours of the morning, a lot of them walked the correct number of steps to things like the TV and fridge, only to find that they had walked past these things thanks to their longer legs.

They could also still hear the rhythmic mechanical pumping of pumps in Milky Way's room as the cow's bounty was depleted over time. To help get her into her room, they had rolled her onto the broken table's cloth, then pulled that cloth to get her to her room, where milk pumps had been set up ready for her. Sometimes, Blaze wondered if this academy was sentient and shapeshifting, maybe affected by some kind of Semblance. It would explain how messes like the one they'd left in the kitchen suddenly got cleaned up.

Everyone was out of their room and talking to each other quietly by the time Weiss finally emerged from her room like a miserable shambling zombie, her eyes sore from crying.

Her hair had been cut into an ugly and choppy mess, her Faunus ears were hidden by a fashionable white furry Ushanka that shoved her ears down, and her Faunus tail had been shoved down the leg of some baggy black pants with white bandages wrapped around her ankles.

Blake let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. She was glad the poor girl didn't try to cut those body parts off, and had just tried to hide them.

Weiss poured herself a bowl of golden nuggets, and she quietly sat down on one of the team's sofas in a curled-up fetus-like position to watch some TV.

Blaze looked at Blake, who was reading a book. Then he looked at Weiss. "For what it's worth, I think your tail and ears are beautiful."

"SHUT YOUR TRAP, YOU GODDAMN IDIOT!" Weiss snapped, running out of the room and leaping like a dolphin through a glass window, running out of the school and towards the school's built-in church. Nobody ever went there, with all those statues and stained glass windows staring down on her, so she could curl up and hide and cry as much as she wanted.

"You've got a real way with women." Blake commented.

"You seem to like me." Blaze pointed out.

Blake blushed. "I... I can't."

Blaze tilted his head in confusion. "What do you mean?"

"I'm not ready to... feel. With people. I'm not ready to open up and pour everything out. I'm not ready yet. I can't get into a relationship or trust anyone with my heart."

"Is it my fault?" Blaze asked.

"No. My first love... Was a bad person. And he made me do some terrible things."

Yang smiled and grabbed her in a tight hug, shoving the catgirl's head against her chest. "I've been there!"

"No you haven't." Blake whispered.

Yang ignored her. "My first love was a real hunk of a man! He showered me in gifts and praise and attention and I thought he loved me. He was a Spider guy, three years older than me, and I was just fourteen. And every time he talked about how Faunuses were oppressed and mistreated based on their looks, I just melted! Every time I said something he didn't like, he guilted me into going along with it by calling me racist towards Faunus, and calling me tolerant when I did what he wanted. He even gave me foot massages. He really wanted to sweep me off my feet... And one day, he did. I was just a kid, but he swept me off my feet and used his Semblance to stick me to the ground. And he almost... got me. I kept saying no, but he kept insisting I was just scared of him because he was part Spider, and he kept insisting I'd enjoy it once it started, and I got so mad, ended up unlocking my Semblance for the first time. I ripped through the web and punched him so hard, I killed him. All the pain I'd ever felt was stored, ready for that one punch. My one punch depleted all his aura and caved his skull in, and when my punch slammed him against the wall on the other side of the room, he burst open like a grape."

Blake snapped. "Look, it's great that your first kill was someone you wanted dead, but mine wasn't! That man made me kill people for the White Fang!"

The girls and Blaze looked at her in horror.

"You worked... For them?" Ruby gasped.

"No." Blake whispered. "But he did, and I didn't figure it out in time. My parents were..."

Someone knocked the door.

Chloe Eunice, the Skunk Faunus from Ren and Nora's team showed up at 7AM, knocking the door.

Blake opened the door just a little so only her head could be seen. "Yes?"

"I heard something loud coming from this room yesterday. It sounded to my expert ears like a gut in danger of being expelled from the body, weird as that sounds. Are y'all okay?"

Blake rolled her eyes. "We're fine. Yang turned on the TV, its volume was too high, and some cartoon character on TV farted."

Blake slammed the door shut.

"That's one crazy coincidence," Chloe shrugged as she went back to her room. Then she chuckled to herself. "Don't ask them for a farting contest, just keep walking..."

She kept walking, and smiled. "Good girl. Now nobody will think you're weird."

Back in Team RWWBBY's room, Ruby ate all of the diced-bacon and chocolate cookies coated with chocolate she baked for herself and her brother, and decided to say something. "I should go and talk to Weiss."

She turned into rose petals and flew away through the window Weiss had smashed.

Blake rolled her eyes again. "Yeah, that's a great idea. Send the least tactful member of our team to do that."

"She's the most honest member of our team. And that's what Weiss needs right now." Blaze defended his sister.

Later that day, Ruby returned with Weiss in tow. Both were holding hands, and both looked like they'd been crying, but Weiss seemed able to hold things together now.

Blaze ran over and grabbed Weiss in a tight hug. "I'm glad you're back!" He smiled.

"Get off me, you dolt!" She snapped.

"Bite me, Princess." He grinned. "Nobody tells me what to do."

She growled at him, baring new pointy foxy fangs he just noticed in her.

The sight of his surprise at her mouth angered her. "You think I'm a monster, don't you?" She asked.

"It's okay! I'm into that!" He insisted.

Weiss only grew angrier.

Yang cackled and rolled on the floor.

Ruby took over. "What he's trying to say is he's fine with your new appearance."

"I like it way more!" Blaze admitted. "This is the real you, after all!"

Weiss was shocked. "The real me?"

"Everyone here in this room is the real us!" Blaze smiled. "Where no outsiders can see us, we're all ourselves!"

Weiss thoughtfully contemplated that. "The real us..."

She made up her mind.

"Everyone, I have an announcement to make." Weiss said to everyone. "What I'm about to say doesn't leave this room, understand?"

Ruby, Blake, Yang, and Blaze nodded.

"I... I've always suspected there's a reason why my father favoured my elder sisters and younger brother over me." Weiss admitted. "Why my hearing was never all that good, until today. Why my father always forbade me from setting foot in any church. Why those who worked for the church took such an interest in me and my family life. Why my family never wanted me as its Heiress, and why I knew my future would only be secure if I broke away from that family and learned to fend for myself. Why my white hair has some pale wintery-blue streaks I dye out of it for appearance's sake."

"You're from the future?" Blaze guessed.

"No, you dolt! My father isn't Jacques Schnee!" Weiss declared. "My mother was Willow Schnee, and my father... It's someone I knew I shared a connection with, the moment I saw him."

She checked a clock on the wall, and turned on the TV. "This is my father!" She declared.

Everyone crowded around the TV, to see...

An episode of Spongebob Squarepants in which Spongebob and Patrick were playing with hooks.

"I knew it!" Blaze declared as Ruby and Yang laughed.

"Wrong channel!" Weiss shouted, blushing furiously as she channel-flipped until she finally found it. Not the cartoon channel, the hot babes channel, the cars channel, the hot men channel, the hot babes on cars channel, the teleshopping channel, or the pawn shop channel. It was the religion channel, and the man on TV was an old man. He wore a black and white Bishop's hat coated in black and white chessboard squares, he wore fine red robes with checkered black and white squares outlining the edges. Two massive swords with attached rocket launchers were crossed at his back. He was bald, a beard covered his mouth and chin, and his eyes were the deepest crimson red. He also had a fluffy white fox tail and long fluffy fox ears, though with a lot of white hair spiking out of the insides. And he spoke about how we must serve the God of Light and never give in to despair, for that is what the Scion of Sin wants. He kept calling everyone his sheep, his flock, his children, and he spoke of the importance of love and family.

"My father is Pope Schwarzweib Valentine!" Weiss declared. "While my father was on a business trip on the other side of Atlas, my mother cheated on my father with the goddamn Pope!"

Blake's mouth fell open. "No way..."

But Yang, Blaze, and Ruby were checking out the old man's weapons. "Cool swords!" Ruby smiled.

"Hey, Weiss, what's a Pope?" Blaze asked.

"Are you dolts serious?!" Weiss asked, turning the TV off. "Long ago, Atlas had one leader. One King, and his royal family, said to have divine blood in his veins. He ruled unquestioned for thousands of years. His power was limited only by The Pope, the holiest man in all of Atlas with the strongest aura of all. He might not be the best fighter, but unlike the King, he doesn't need to be. But before his demise and the Royal Family's flight, he was advised by a board of corporations. The Royal Family was overthrown by angry workers dissatisfied at how crappy Atlas got once it stopped trying to conquer the world, and the peasants teamed up with the military to take over and make a government that failed. The Pope and his followers were integrated into the military at gunpoint, though The Pope is who they truly follow, and few could stop The Pope if he wanted to form his own splinter faction. His religion is common in other lands, too. Reforms turned Atlas into a military stratocracy where you must complete a term of duty in the military to have rights and be a citizen, otherwise you're lower than scum and you belong in the slums, where you do crimes to get money you can use to flee to other countries. The military is still in charge of everything now but the corporations have replaced that inefficient sham of a formerly-democratic government through bribes and deals, and the Schnee Dust Company practically rules everything over there. The Pope is biding his time, waiting for the moment to take over. The monarchs fled to Vale, to be sheltered and protected in the hopes that their offspring a few generations from now will repay this kindness after taking the throne. There's a movement in Atlas that wants to restore the monarchs, and go back to trying to take over the world. But the Schnee Dust Company would rather take over the world through commerce than waste money fighting a war. My father wanted my eldest sister to take over the Atlesian Military, while my second-eldest sister Winter would be married off to the royal family, while raising Whitley to take over the company, securing the SDC's control over the future of Atlas no matter what. But then... My eldest sister was killed by the White Fang, and Winter joined the military because she hated the man my father wanted to force her to marry. His plans were forced to change, and he hates that. He hasn't formally announced that I am not his flesh and blood because he has plans for me. But I don't know what they are. My father had my grandmother's Plastic Surgeon, a woman with a body-altering Semblance, change my ears out for some artificial ones and take my tail away. I don't know what The Pope has planned for me, either. I just know I don't want to be anyone's puppet! My father might want me to infiltrate the Church for him, and The Pope might want me to betray my family for him, but I am nobody's puppet! My father is not a Schnee, my mother is, and I am more of a Schnee than he will ever be!"

Weiss started to cry, and the whole team hugged her until she stopped crying. But they were missing Milky Way, whose moo was heard once again.

"I know what'll make you feel better!" Ruby announced. "Snuggle pile!"

Ruby grabbed Weiss bodily and threw herself towards the ground, dragging Weiss along for the ride. The non-Heiress screamed as Yang and Blaze joined in, holding Weiss and Blaze tight with a single arm each, then Yang and Ruby opened a free arm to beckon a shocked Blake closer. Ruby's face was full of innocent kindness, while Yang's face was suggestive, but Blake went along with it anyway and joined the snuggle pile.

"What is this?" Weiss demanded.

Blaze snuggled closer to Weiss while wrapping an arm around Blake's taut muscular stomach and pulling her closer. "It's a snuggle pile! It's like a group hug but better."

"The only rule is no kissing." Yang explained, nuzzling the side of Blake's face and causing the catgirl's entire face to redden. "But everything else is fine."

"If you insist." Weiss sighed, and waited. "When does this start feeling nice?"

Weiss yelped with a blush as Ruby grabbed her tail and started stroking it.

Blaze grinned. "Don't stress about how it feels. Just relax and take in the love!"

And so, the five remained like that for a while.

"Isn't this nice and warm, Princess?" Blaze softly asked her.

"Ssh. I'm trying not to find this weird." Weiss replied. "I've never been this close with anyone before in my life."

And then Blake sat up and threw her ribbon away, pulling her pants so her feline tail could escape. "I'm a Faunus." She admitted.

Ruby smiled and gently pulled her back into the snuggle pile. "We knew all along, but we're proud of you for finally telling us."

The four girls and Blaze resumed cuddling, and Blake took an interest in Ruby, turning around to put her butt in Blaze's face while she dangled her tail over Ruby's face. The adorable little puppy-like girl started to bat at it and try to catch it like a cat.

Weiss's ears twitched. "Being able to hear everyone's heartbeat is... Strange."

"Yeah." Blake agreed. "But it's nice, too. People can lie with their mouths and their bodies, but nobody can lie with their heartbeats. Remind me to teach you how to sense lies by listening to heartbeats some time."

"Weiss?" Ruby asked.

Weiss felt awkward again, but falling back on formality gave her a sense of control over the situation. "Yes, Ruby?"

"Your ears must hear really good now, huh?"

"They do," Weiss nodded.

"I'll play my guitar for you some day soon!" Ruby declared.

Weiss gasped. "You play?" She asked hopefully.

"Are you kidding?" Ruby grinned. "I've been playing the death metal guitar for years! I'll go get it-"

She started to get up, but Yang pulled her back. "Oh, no you don't! You know the rules, nothing interrupts the snuggle pile."

"Except needing to pee." Ruby added.

"Except needing to pee." Yang and Blaze nodded solemnly, remembering a day from their past Weiss would ask about some day later.

For an hour, the party of five remained like that.

Together.

Someone knocked the door, and the moment was ruined. Weiss pulled away from everyone and curled into a fetus-like ball at the realization that she'd never felt so close to anyone and had no idea what to do with these new feelings, Yang leapt up like a fighter ready to punch someone, Ruby stretched and revealed that she'd been needing to pee for a while and could finally go now that this was over, and Blake stared off into the distance as she wondered if she was really ready to open up. Then she quickly shoved her tail down her pants and threw her ribbon back over her ears as Ruby turned to rose petals and flew towards the team's showers.

Everyone else quickly separated and got in different points around the room, pretending to be apart from one another. Blake read an upside-down book, before turning it right-side up. Yang looked at a mini-fridge full of food and one urine jar she decided to ignore right now as she closed the fridge and decided to lean against the wall looking cool, Weiss scrambled to turn the TV back on and change the TV's channel back to Spongebob, which she pretended to watch as Blaze opened the door.

"Hello, can I help you?" Blaze greeted.

A Faunus rabbit woman was there, twenty eight years old and incredibly muscular, in a green spandex with orange sneakers and white bandages around her delicious hips. Pineapple Grenades shaped like carrots were at her belt but she had no weapon besides those. Her thighs were bared and Blaze wondered if it was the crippling depression from his youth or something else that made him want to be killed by those big meaty muscle columns. Her hair was a long orange ponytail that kind of resembled a carrot, and her eyes were green.

"Yes, and I'm here to help all of you! I'm Professor Pandora Paradoxacles, the fountain of youth!" She turned and struck a powerful pose with bent arms and her fists shoved together, muscles rippling and bulging. Blaze's whole life, he'd been attracted to soft and cute women, but this beauty had awoken something new within him. To his shock, the world around them seemed to transform, and she was suddenly posing in front of a massive raging waterfall that poured into a clear blue lake, and they were standing on grassy plains in front of the lake. "These muscles have been passed down the Paradoxacles line for generations! Professor Ozpin said your team shows potential, but needs some training! That's why I'm here! You also have a new arrival! Come on out, little one, and show them your youthful face!"

And then, a little girl came out from behind the woman. Blaze recognized her face. He'd seen it just seconds ago. He'd seen it almost every day since his life truly began. The shock of it snapped him out of his trance and dispersed the illusion of the nature scene.

Ruby was behind this beautiful woman. Ruby Rose, in her same old outfit, except there wasn't a weapon at her back and wherever red once existed on her, blue now took its place.

"Guys?" He called. "You need to see this!"


	17. Red Blue and Green

The real Ruby Rose came out first, and gasped in horror at her "New little sister".

"What the hell?" Yang quietly asked, looking between the copy of Ruby as she looked a few days ago, and the taller Ruby at her side.

"By God..." Weiss whispered.

"This is odd." Blake admitted.

"Awww, you used to be so cute!" Blaze smiled, ruffling the tiny Ruby's dark blue-black hair. She smiled and leaned into the headpats adorably.

And just like that, he had eliminated all the tension in the air.

"I still am cute!" The real Ruby pouted, grabbing Blaze's other hand and dropping it on her own head. With a grin, the man began headpatting both Ruby Rose and her doppelganger.

Blake smiled a little. "So, Ruby... Who's the lucky man?"

"Huh?" Ruby wondered innocently.

"Who do we have to thank for your daughter here?" Blake wondered. "Jaune? Cardin? Ren? Blaze?"

"Nobody!" Ruby insisted. "Nobody ever ever ever!"

Yang grinned and hugged her girlfriend. "You're so funny! Don't worry, Rubes, she's just messing with you."

"This is what Echo from the Friend Area ended up making!" Pandora the Rabbit declared.

"This is what Echo from the Friend Area ended up making?" Yang asked. "I guess all the positive traits we mentioned are technically things Ruby has, but I thought she said she didn't make copies of people."

"She doesn't make mockeries of people." Pandora explained. "Or anything that would live a life any more miserable than the life of a soldier can be. But she loves giving teams not what they want, but what they need."

"I thought she said it would have taken months for her to be born." Blake noted.

"It would have, normally. But I helped!" Pandora smiled. "My Semblance, Fountain Of Power, is a simple one. When someone with my blessing expends sufficient effort, and it can be me or anyone I choose, energy is built up within them. That energy can enhance punches and kicks, restore aura, it can even be expelled in explosive balls and lasers. And it can enhance the muscles or Semblances of someone else. I took her to the training arena and worked her halfway to death and back to make sure this girl was born as soon as possible!"

"What's my name?" The small blue Ruby asked them.

"We forgot to give you a name?" Weiss wondered. "I could have sworn I requested a good and obedient Faunus maid girl, half cat and half rabbit, by the name of Mewn River."

"And I could have sworn I said I'd shoot you, the cat rabbit, and Echo if she made that," Blake reminded her newly-animalistic teammate.

Blake realized something. "All those hundreds of request forms Echo made us fill out... She ignored everything she didn't like on them, and wrote up her own request form containing everything she did like?"

Pandora grinned. "That's right!"

Ruby looked horrified. "Echo likes me?!"

Pandora frowned. "Not right! Echo simply thought you were the perfect warrior, kind-hearted and strong without any issues at all."

"I have tons of issues!" Ruby insisted. "I don't even remember my own mother's face! She left to fight Grimm on the day she had me, and I never saw her again outside of a photograph, painting, or a church's stained glass window!"

Blake raised an eyebrow. "Giving birth didn't faze her at all? Did it... hurt?"

"No." Ruby admitted.

"Are you sure your mother wasn't a Faunus?" Blake asked. "Faunus can give birth without pain. It's even easier than taking a dump for us, and it's part of why our lands are so overcrowded. That, and our pro-childbirth culture. And because the Fangs like to- Sorry, you were about to tell me if your mom's a Faunus or not."

"If she was one, she never told us." Ruby looked down sadly.

Blake explained, "The day I was born, my mother had given birth to me in her sleep without realizing it."

"Are you sure?" Yang asked. "How do you know someone didn't just sneak in and leave you there?"

"Because my father was already awake, brushing his long lion-man hair for an hour every morning in the mirror as usual, when it happened. When... I... happened."

"That's kind of strange." Weiss said. "Is that why Faunus lands get overpopulated so quickly?"

"No, it's because the White Fang like to..." Blake whispered something in Weiss's ears.

"They use captured Faunus slaves for WHAT?!" Weiss screeched, hurting every the ears of every Faunus in the room, even her own. "Ow, my ears. No wonder you Faunuses have such low voices, high sounds hurt."

"White Fang training camps train child soldiers from the day of their birth to ensure they're as radicalized as they can possibly be," Blake explained. "The White Fang doesn't want any of its soldiers to think back on the human friends they once had, and hesitate to deprive some human kid somewhere of their parents. Sometimes, they'll train these kids so hard they die of exhaustion. And they don't care or take any safety precautions. There are always more Faunus children to replace the fallen."

Weiss looked disgusted.

"Sometimes, they decide to... Recruit. They'll kidnap unaffiliated Faunus women, or human women, sometimes they'll even kidnap married human couples and tie them all up. They'll feed the women the petals of a plant named Foxdie. If a human eats a petal, they turn into a Faunus for a few hours. If they eat enough petals, their transformation is permanent. Some warriors dose up on it because being a Faunus improves your strength and speed while giving you animal instincts that are great for combat but difficult to control. And if a Faunus eats a petal, they are... Prepared. For something bad. Something crowds of White Fang members love doing to tied-up women. And after that, the White Fang like to-"

"I don't want to hear any more!" Weiss insisted.

But Blake whispered it anyway, just under her breath, and every Faunus in the room heard it, including Weiss, who vomited right on the ground in front of everyone.

"Sometimes, male White Fang members will do this to women. Sometimes, female White Fang members will do this to men." Blake explained. "Right in front of their girlfriends, or their wives, or even their own human mothers and fathers. In front of anyone they can kidnap. Except the children, thank God. The White Fang send Faunus children to the camps for brainwashing instead, so they'll grow up thinking humans are pure evil and the White Fang is 'just an idea' and a good idea instead of the terrible idea and evil terrorist organization they really are. The healthy-looking children get brainwashed in camps, and the weak human children... The White Fang thugs shoot them in front of the parents before anything like what I just mentioned goes down. They love destroying the hope in human hearts and killing everything they hold dear."

"The White Fang need to die! Every last one!" Blaze declared.

"But what about all that junk they say about Faunus inequality?" Yang checked.

"It sounds cooler than admitting what those Fangs are really here for: Biting into humans and stealing their lifeblood! Or in this case, their Dust. Lying about inequality and blaming all your personal problems on invisible discrimination is easier than taking responsibility for yourself and trying to better yourself. All they care about is power, and they don't care how they get it or their actions make other Faunus look! They want to rule through fear, and they don't care if their actions inspire fear AND hatred, as long as they inspire fear. Slaughtering humans at random won't make the friends and family members left behind sympathetic to Faunus! There used to be a group called the White Lotus that wanted peace between Humans and Faunus. But they were all killed by the White Fang, who joined up with a human supremacy organization for extra firepower during that fight. And then they betrayed the humans after the fight was over! The White Fang doesn't care about making things better for Faunus, it just wants Faunus to join it and fight for it and die for it so the Faunus can take over towns and plunder them!" Blake shouted. "The White Fang are pure evil, and anyone who supports them is pure evil, because the White Fang say the opposite is true. The White Fang say everyone who's not a White Fang member is evil, including newborn babies! It's why they love genociding newborn babies in the towns they take over, before enslaving the human men and women! Anyone who supports such an evil terrorist organization is nothing but pure evil, no ifs, ands, or buts! If anyone on this planet wants to make things better for Faunus, they have to destroy the White Fang and kill every last one of them first!"

Everyone stopped and thought about this for a while.

"Guys... What's my name?" The Ruby clone dressed in blue asked Team RWWBBY.

"Uh..." Weiss thought about all the punny faunus names for attractive Faunus maids she and Yang had dreamed up. None of them seemed to fit the girl before them.

"She's going to be part of my family so her last name will be Rose. So... How about Ruby 2?" Ruby asked. "Or Two-bee?"

"Hell no, a name that dumb will give her an existential crisis! Plus, barely anyone out there is smart enough to understand a name like Two-bee!" Blaze protested. "You have to have a very high IQ to understand the works of Shakespear, the ultimate warrior poet. We should give her a completely different name like... Red Rose! Or Blood Rose! Or Heart Rose! Or Hope Rose- wait no hope doesn't make you think of a colour."

"And hearts do make you think of a colour?" Blake asked.

"Yeah, red. Or black, because of playing cards." Blaze explained. "But she's blue, so we should call her something blue."

"Red's a boring name!" Yang complained. "How about... Ocean Rose? Get it? Get it? Like the ocean's rising and falling?"

"The ocean only looks blue because of light refraction." Blaze shook his head intellectually. "How about we call her Sky Rose? It'd make the team name RRWWBBY so it wouldn't change how we pronounce it."

"No, wait..." Ruby got a great idea. "Blueberry Rose! Blueberries and Roses are both plants, and blueberries are blue, and her name starts with a B so we can be Team RWWBBBY now without changing how the name is pronounced, and if we want to we could call her Blueby for short but we don't have to if she hates that, and-"

"I LOVE IT!" Blueberry Rose declared, hugging her "Big sister" in red.

"Welcome to the family, Blueberry!" Blaze hugged his littlest sister with a grin. "I'm Blaze Rose, and I'm adopted."

"You'll love it here! I'm Yang Xiao Long, Ruby's half-sister! Her dad married my mom."

"I'm Weiss Schnee, Mage of Team RWWBBY." Weiss explained. "That's Ruby, but with two Ws and two Bs, because our team is already bigger than normal so why not grow it even larger? At this rate we'll probably invite that odd girl we saw back at that bar to our team soon."

"I'm Blake. Assassin of Team RWWBBY." Blake flatly stated. "Let's do lunch some time."

"Where is our cow?" Weiss wondered. "Are we really going to train without her?"

"She's a joke character, she doesn't really matter." Pandora waved her concern away. "She will probably never get a cool scene where she saves all of us! ...Just kidding, she's already highly trained. Not like you rookies!"

"Should I go get a spare weapon for Blueberry, while I work on something official for her based on her preferences, her role as a fighter, and any Semblance she might unlock?" Blaze asked.

"There's no need for that!" Pandora Paradoxacles held her hands above her head, and her aura gathered in a long, thin pole held in both mitts. Spinning the pole, a scythe's deadly edge formed at the tip as a sniper rifle grew along the handle. When she stopped spinning her weapon, it had become a perfectly-accurate blue imitation of Ruby's very own Crescent Rose!

"Woah!" Ruby gasped.

"With my Semblance, Panic and Pain, I can create any weapon I desire out of my own aura! It takes a lot of aura, so I use it before combat, not during combat. It's a good thing my incredible stamina reserves have been passed down the Paradoxacles line for generations! Along with a family fighting style for every type of weapon in the world!"

"Wait, I thought your Semblance turned exercise into energy that does magic junk." Yang said.

"It does! Your beautiful teacher, Pan-Do-Ra Pa-Ra-Dox-A-Kleeze has two Semblances!" Pandora smiled.

Everyone's mouth fell open.

"You're like me?" Weiss asked. "You have a Bloodline Limit?"

"Not at all, my dear! I have two Semblances, thanks to... Well, I shouldn't say. You'll find out when the time is right. Now, come on! Off to the official training ground number seven!" Pandora declared.

And so, they left.


	18. Welcome to Pandora's Labyrinth

Team RWBBBY trained for hours, under the agonizing influence of Pandora's Semblance, which sapped their energy and made every motion feel like it was made under the weight of a thousand planets. And yet, it kept away fatigue. Nothing stopped you from pushing yourself besides your temporary pain.

And they weren't training in their usual gym room. They were training in the Neon Zone, a special room that made necessary objects, artificial enemies, and environmental hazards out of pure energy filtered through all four dust types shoved into an overly-complicated engine that worked using technology so ancient, only the mysterious Ozpin knew how to use it.

In a dark and misty rainforest, surrounded by trees with plant life covering the ground, Ruby and Blaze and Blueberry sparred with their personal training sensei and got beaten so badly, they thought they might die. The first time things got bad for them, the team's cow showed up to heal them. Finally, they thought they had an edge... Until their sensei stopped holding back. Now, it was a struggle to survive long enough for your bone breaks and aura loss to be healed by milk balls tossed by Milky Way to seep into their skin.

Yang struck logs with her fists and legs until her aura broke and her knuckles bled.

Weiss ran atop a treadmill that started at seventy miles an hour and sped up from there, while using her Glyphs to deflect tennis balls fired by tennis-ball-guns Pandora had set up.

And Blake split her gun into a pair of daggers as she fought against armies of holographic man-sized projections made by their gym's training room.

It was brutal, painful, agonizing training that went on past the point that any sensible sensei would call a good spot to stop and rest.

Pandora knew how far she could push others using her Semblance. And she pushed this team close to that limit until they all broke down and needed to rest.

"You've done well, my adorable students!" Pandora shouted, putting her hands on her lovely hips. "You'll make fine Huntsmen and Huntresses some day. For now, get some rest!"

She said that, and left the Neon Zone...

And then she locked the door behind her and started spawning in bandits and wild animals for the team to fight.

"Pandoraaa!" Blaze roared in exhausted fury as he readied his weapons and prepared to fight once more.


	19. He even creeps me out!

Midnight.

Rain? Heavy.

Team RWWBBY's location? A rainforest.

Their shelter? Minimal, only a tent made from wooden poles and washed animal pelts.

Their campfire? A roaring inferno.

Their food? The meat from jungle animals who had tried to kill them.

They had spent three days in this hellish jungle, and they had spent so long searching and travelling that they were sure this room went on forever.

Everyone was cold, wet, and miserable. Everyone was drained, tired, and suffering.

Ruby and Blaze had fallen asleep in each other's arms with Yang serving as their pillow, her pillowy mounds of dreams helping them rest. But concern was clear on her face, because she couldn't rest. And neither could her teammates.

The cat, Blake, was at her side, though turned away from everyone to stare suspiciously at their newest teammate, Blueberry Rose. That girl simply sat in the corner of their tent and stared at nothing, as though waiting for the tent's walls to tell her something funny. The cow, Milky Way, having provided much of their food today, was the only other sleeping girl among them, passed out with a dreamy bliss on her face that only served to tick Yang off. And then there was Weiss, who stared miserably into their campfire, with an oddly far-away look on her face.

And now, as Yang wondered how she'd ever get out of this, she startedd to feel their teacher's Semblance do anything good for them. Yang felt her muscles clench and tighten, felt her biceps grow buffer and her thighs grow finer, and she noticed similar benefits happening to the two family members in her arms. While Yang's muscles grew outwards for more mass and intimidation, and Blaze's muscles did the same, Ruby's muscles seemed determined to retain the physique of a dancer.

She glanced over at her teammates, to see how their bodies had changed. Blake and Weiss followed Ruby's path of the dancer, and she wondered if it was a Faunus thing. After all, Faunus carried more strength in their bodies than humans, especially the women. While a thin Faunus boy could beat a buff adult man in an arm-wrestling match without aura, both could gain aura and still fall short of beating a faunus girl. As for Milky, she seemed thicker and stockier and more motherly than ever before. And that muscled back... It was enough to make those who sculpted old Atlesian statues renounce their faith and worship the god of chicks with muscles. Yang supposed the sheer wideness of Milky made sense, considering what weights she carried around every day. Blueberry, on the other hand... It wasn't that she had barely changed. It was that she had not changed at all. She'd gotten faster than she was three days ago, but it was as if her very existence was permanently tied to the image of Ruby held by her creator on the day she was born.

Yang's mind started to wander. And she wondered... Would Blueberry age? Would Blueberry grow taller, or grow old? Could she reproduce? If she had kids, would they look like more Ruby Roses? Or would they start off looking like babies, and then grow into Rubies? Would her kids grow old?

Was Blueberry even real? Did she even exist?

Why...

Yang stared at the ceiling, tears forming in her eyes.

Why did her mother leave her?

Why did her father always favour Ruby over her, when she was so obviously the daughter of Summer Rose and Qrow? Why did her father favour Blaze over her, when she trained so much harder than anyone she knew and all he did was tinker with weapons?

Did the blood in her veins, the blood of her father, mean nothing to him?

He taught her to fight. He taught her to stand on her own two feet. But why was he so much more willing to hug Ruby or Blaze than his own flesh and blood? Once, he'd looked so proud of her ability to punch trees into splinters and punch wild horses into the ground. So why did he lose interest once she started punching men twice and even thrice her size into the ground? When she started dressing revealingly and heading to bars and returning home drunk, why did he stop caring? Why didn't he beg her to stop?

She resented her dad so much, and craved his love...

And yet, she couldn't bring herself to bring any of that resentment anywhere near her two beloved siblings.

She'd never gotten a chance to reveal this to anyone...

But more than anything, Yang wanted to be told she was doing okay, and that everything she'd done mattered.

Yang looked down at her siblings. Ruby, so pure and so kind, if a little simple...

And Blaze. After all this time, she wasn't sure what to make of his personality. It was as if he put on so many different masks around so many people, that all he knew were the masks. He loved to make the people he loved happy. But he never seemed to know what to do with himself when he was alone, besides tinkering with machines.

Even now, he wore the remnants of something unfinished and currently worthless on his right arm. He'd kept it in his pocket until now, but this morning he'd taken it out and given it its first test-run... only for his device to break and explode violently. Thank god for Milky's ability to re-attach lost arms. The device on his arm was somewhat like a big and solid gold watch, shiny and reflective, though with a raised centerpiece that could compress itself on command. And rather than telling the time, it held seven circles for shotgun-sized Dust bullets. When fully compressed, each of those bullets were like dangerous bombs, yet his watch held no way to eject or launch these crushed and ruined bullets.

Yang thought of the horror she felt when her little brother almost lost his arm today.

She wished she could shield her family from all the horrors of this world...

And she wished her family hadn't been forced to get so big. Weiss's icy exterior were melting slowly and Blake's labyrinthine walls were starting to come down, but she had no idea what to think of Milky Way or their team's newest member.

Blueberry Rose... She was so eager, so joyous, so childish, yet surprisingly witty at times. At the rest of the time, she seemed denser than Ruby at her worst. It was as if someone cloned Ruby, kept her love of weaponry and fighting, kept her knowledge of breathing, and dropped what little she knew of social situations and tact. The girl was an absolute airhead for everything except weapons, Milky's fine dining, and breathing. The more she talked to this little girl, the more she felt like she was talking to some cartoonish mockery of her little sister and the woman she was slowly growing into.

Yang didn't notice when she'd fell asleep, she only noticed the fact that she woke up the next morning with tired eyes and a sore body.

Day seven of life in an artificial jungle.

Blake thought this mundane existence as a jungle-dwelling apex predator would be the same for the rest of her life. Wake up, kill some wild animals that attacked her first, continue living, sleep. Wake up, kill some wild animals that attacked her first, continue living, sleep. Wake up, spend hours slaying wave after wave of artificial Grimm Beowulves that came from nowhere and focused all their energy on trying to kill Ruby of all people, continue living, sleep.

But on the tenth day, things changed.

An artificial construct designed by some monster and built by the system, a glowing little blue dot with little dragonfly wings, joined their party.

And she never stopped telling them trivia about the world.

At the same time, the world got harder to live in every day.

Traps started to appear where there should not have been traps.

Enemies became more numerous, relentless, and aggressive.

It was as if someone flipped a switch on the machine they were stuch inside, and that's probably what happened.

But one day...

The digital hell they were trapped inside started to send digital representations of White Fang assassins after the team.

Swarms of them. Legions of them. Hundreds of thousands of them. Some were unimportant distractions to mow down, some were powerful and mighty warriors, and some had incredibly devastating Semblances that challenged everything they knew about reality by rewriting the very rules of existence around them.

Blake came to trust her friends.

Slowly, at first.

But just as killing became easier for her friends, feeling and caring became easier for her.

She even became comfortable with asking for Milky's special milk.

That cow certainly had plenty to spare, even with the occasional need for healing.

And tonight, on their fourth month in this forest hell...

They encountered their greatest challenge yet...

One man who changed everything.

A flash of red light heralded his arrival as he stepped through a red portal that closed up behind him.

He was a handsome adult in his late twenties or early thirties, and his skin was a dark tanned colour. His eyebrows were black and segmented, dotted lines just like morse code. An open-chested brown jacket bared his muscular chest, though he thankfully wore black pants and brown cowboy boots. "Hellooooooo, darlings!" He sang as he pranced towards them.

Once he'd gotten close enough, Yang slugged him in the face on sight.

No friends existed in this jungle unless they were part of Team RWWBBY. If you weren't Ruby rose, Weiss schnee/valentine, milky Way, Blake belladonna, Blaze rose, or Yang xiao long, you were going to die.

Her strike broke this monster's jaw... And somehow, it shattered Ruby's jaw completely.

"RUBY!" The tortured screech from Yang's broken throat stunned even the man, and Yang cradled her younger sister in horror while blood dripped from the mouth of the sinner and poured from the mouth of the victim. Too tearful for rage, she cradled her wounded sister and cried as Milky shoved her finger into Ruby's mouth and tried helping her to swallow the healing milk she generated.

"What did you do?!" Blaze demanded as he grabbed the man's throat, choking hard and savouring the sound of his fearful throat, only for the sound of Weiss's choked gasps to meet his ears in a sickening harmony. Blaze looked back and saw Weiss lift off the ground, throat crushed visibly by the thick fingers of an invisible man.

Blaze released the man, and Weiss was released as well. A sickeningly smirk smug formed on the man's face.

Blaze resumed choking the man, and Weiss resumed getting choked.

"My name," The man said, and Blaze resumed choking the man, just to see if Weiss would be choked some more. She was, and Milky Way started getting choked in the same way.

Blaze released the man. "What's going on here?"

Yang ignited harder than she'd ever ignited before, releasing a sound like cannonfire. "I'LL KILL YOU!" She roared, as her blood-red eyes started to bleed and the flames on her hair snaked down to her fists.

"No, wait!" Blaze insisted, standing in her way. "His Semblance, I think it reflects damage somehow!"

"Then I'll just have to kill him faster than any of us can die!" Yang snapped.

"What if he takes one of us with him?" Blaze asked. "What if he kills Ruby?"

That broke through her rage, and brought her to her knees. "No..." She whispered. "Not Ruby!"

"Let me finish, you idiot!" The man screamed, punching Blaze in the face hard enough to send him flying into a tree. Ruby screamed in pain and clutched at her right hand, just as the man started shaking the slightly-sore knuckles of his right hand. "What's the point of having a Semblance if you aren't going to explain exactly how it works to your helpless, adorable little victims? My name is Steel. Steel Offgrey. And if you're wondering if I'm a part of this simulation... No. I'm sure your old teacher would never unleash me on you. And I'm sure she's not coming to save you... Because if she was watching you and she recognized me, she'd die if it meant sending everyone in the world after me. She was my first victim, after all..."

"What did you do to our teacher?!" Weiss demanded.

"You mean, what did I do to myself?" He laughed, "While my Semblance worked its magic and allowed her to feel my touch from another room? Everything a man can do to himself when alone... There's your answer."

"Why are you here?" Milky asked.

"I'm just here because I love hurting kids! And I was sent to kill you, all of you, by the one she defeated."

Steel Offgrey pointed at Ruby.

"Torchwick sent you?" She gasped.

"That dust-thief we beat up had a name?" Blaze wondered.

"He and I, and some other unlucky souls... We work for the biggest and baddest criminal gang in this country."

"Why isn't Pandora saving us?" Blake asked.

"She trapped you fools in this Zone's jungle for a few months. By burning a lot of time dust, this place can slow time down for everyone within it. A year passes inside, and a few hours pass outside. Useful for training, but very, very exploitable. I could kill you slowly for weeks, and it wouldn't show up on any monitors outside unless I made sure to drag it out for months! It's the perfect place to kill some kids, and make sure this stupid academy thinks they simply failed in their training! As long as nobody looks too closely at the bodies, that is... As long as no animals or AI-controlled enemies get to your bodies first!"

"Why do you know so much about this place?" Blake asked.

"I used to be a student at beacon... Before Pandora got me expelled for having some special fun with her and Glynda!"

"I'm just a lowly assassin, but we're working for some dangerous clients. Our name? Black Moon. We will conquer everything and rise above this world! And speaking of rising..."

He started to dance around the girls. "My heartbeat rises, when I look at you cuties! I was sent to kill you all, but nothing's stopping me from having some fun with you first. Some of my teammates call me a weakling, and none of them were willing to be my partner... But they're fools. It's only the weak who know their true strength! Everyone's weak, deep down, and they just haven't learned that yet. But I'll teach you. I'll teach you better than your little teacher Pandora ever could! I don't have a lot of Aura. But I do have..."

He turned to a tree in the rainforest and kicked it, hurting his leg. He winced in pain, and Blueberry Rose screamed in agony as her right leg bloodily exploded out, waterfalls of blood leaking from where shards of shattered blood pierced skin.

"One unstoppable Semblance!" Steel Offgrey gloated with the most disturbing grin you'll ever see on his face. "I call it Lover's Pain. It forms a bond between me and anyone who catches my fancy, bonding us eternally! And once that bond has formed, it doesn't cost any Aura to maintain! I could keep these bonds up forever, no matter how far away you run and no matter how hard you try to escape me. Nothing escapes my love!"

"Anyone who catches your fancy..." Blaze repeated, as the man walked over to Weiss. "So I'm immune?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that." Steel smirked, and he grinned at the boy before bending down and licking the side of Blaze's horrified face, and then he gently bit his own tongue.

Blaze screamed as the tip of his tongue was severed and blood sprayed out like an out-of-control firehose.

Steel leaned in and intentionally got some of Blaze's blood in his own left eye, causing Blaze to scream even harder as blood gushed from his left eye.

"Such a cute little thing! Oh, your pain feels good... I could just gobble you up whole and bite into your flesh and eat your fucking liver! Oh, the disgust your friends will feel, the pain they'll endure, all for me!" Steel grinned, getting his weapon out of his pants, a short and squat boot-knife with a shotgun's pump along the grip. He cocked the shotgun's pump, forming a sticky white substance on his weapon's tip. Steel pointed his dagger at Weiss and squeezed its handle, and blasted two hot sticky globs of gum at the girl's feet, sticking her to the ground. She struggled and tried to lift her feet up, but the fast-drying elastic gum had her feet stuck fast to the ground. She tried to freeze it with her sword, but he engulfed her weapon in a stream of white goo from his own weapon, drenching the useless blade in hot sticky white gum.

"So good... Weiss, your fear and disgust and desperation feels SOOOOOO **GOOOOOOOOD**!" Steel Offgrey screamed as he shimmied over to Weiss and grabbed her face, making her look right at how good her fear made him feel. His jaw went slack, his eyes rolled into the back of his skull, and he collapsed on top of her and she struggled to stay standing under his weight.

"Get away from me!" Weiss slapped him, only for that impact to send her face to the dirt harder than any of her father's slaps before.

And once she was helpless on the ground, he mounted her and pinned her, feeling her fluffy white ears and savouring the pained look on her face before stroking those ears gently. He sighed disgustingly, right in her face, eyes rolling back as the amplified feelings sent shivers down his spine. Touching the ears of a Faunus was meant to make them happy, but this disgusting monster stole her happy feelings and turned them into disgust. "My Semblance brings us close together, closer than family members, closer than lovers and even wedded couples! We share everything, even feelings, only you feel them more in body and soul. My body is your body..."

Weiss elbowed him in the gut and tried to run away, only for the agonizing pain now burning in her gut to bring her to her knees and make her vomit helplessly on the ground. He brought his foot down on the side of Weiss's face, and bit down gently on his own right hand, his Semblance crushing and mangling her right hand before her very eyes, and as she screamed in horror at her hands, Steel picked her up and kissed her cheek. "And your bodies are mine, darlings."

Horror filled Yang's body, horror and fear.

How could any of them defeat a foe they couldn't punch, or stab, or kill?

How could they defeat this monster without killing themselves, or worse, a friend?


End file.
